Apple yesterday confirmed reports that it was partnering with Google’s Gemini to provide the AI features for Siri and more.
The primary reason for the announcement couldn’t have been made any clearer by the way the company chose to release the news …
The reason for the announcement is obvious
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported that the new Siri will rely on Google Gemini models for its AI smarts. At the time, he believed the company might opt to keep this fact secret rather than explicitly reveal it. This was backed by a subsequent report saying that “some Apple leaders” believed that developing its own model didn’t make sense.
If you had any doubts about why the company made this decision, you have only to look at how the company revealed the information.
It didn’t issue a press release or pass the information to a tech site, but instead released it to CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer. In other words, this announcement was pitched not to Apple customers, but rather to investors who had been questioning when the company was finally going to get its AI act together.
It is, however, good news for both groups.
This is good news for Apple users
While this approach represents a radical departure from the idea of Apple developing its own AI models to power the new Siri, I last week argued that it would be the right approach.
With this approach, we get the best of what the leading AI companies can offer, coupled to Apple’s ironclad privacy guarantees. Given that privacy not performance is Apple’s USP when it comes to artificial intelligence, I can see no great value in Apple persisting in trying to develop its own models given the very slow rate of progress.
My own view now, then, is that Apple should go full steam ahead on using the best available AI models running on its own PCC servers with its own privacy guarantees.
As expected, Apple did indeed confirm the privacy assurances.
Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t provide any lock-in for Apple. While the deal is a multi-year partnership, it leaves the iPhone maker free to use any mix it desires of its own models and Google’s Gemini.
If Apple believes it can do better than Google when it comes to specific tasks, the Cupertino company is free to use its own models for those things. If at some future point Apple pulls ahead of Google’s AI capabilities for intelligent assistants like Siri (however unlikely that might look today), then it can switch path.
Top comment by Jax
I don’t understand how people who follow Apple for a living (!) can have such myopic views.
I’ll say this again: the company made its own maps, chips, bespoke building, and pizza boxes.
AI meanwhile is the biggest thing to happen in tech since the Internet.
How you can then conclude and argue that it’s likely for Apple to be content with (and justified in) using other people’s models is just wild.
In the meantime, for investors and Apple users alike, this allows the company to finally deliver all of the things it promised in that infamously-deleted iPhone 16 video. As my colleague Ryan Christoffel argued yesterday, it also puts the reputations of two companies on the line, not just one, doubling the chances that things will work as they should.
Perhaps understandably, Apple is being deliberately vague on timings, but now that this deal is official, we can at least hope that large chunks of the new Siri will be available sooner rather than later.
Does the news make you feel more optimistic about the new Siri? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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