Yesterday Bloomberg detailed what to expect from Siri in iOS 27, and now today a new report from The Information goes behind-the-scenes on Apple’s AI deal with Google, control of Gemini-based models, model distillation, and more.
Apple has significant freedom in using and modifying Google’s AI tech, says report
Today in The Information’s latest ‘AI Agenda’ column, a variety of details of Apple and Google’s AI deal have been outlined.
The report says that Apple’s partnership is “deeper than previously known.” As part of the agreement, Apple reportedly gets “a lot more freedom with Google’s tech” than was expected.
From the report:
Apple has complete access to the Gemini model in its own data center facilities. Apple can use that access to produce smaller models that power specific tasks or are small enough to run directly on Apple devices so they can run the tasks faster, said a person who has direct knowledge of the arrangement.
As explained by The Information, this process of producing new, offshoot models is called “distillation.” It’s a way in which one LLM can transfer knowledge to smaller, more streamlined models.
What’s the benefit of this? Smaller models can be more efficient, requiring less computing power and delivering results faster. As explained above, they make a lot more sense for running on-device than larger models that need to live in the cloud.
Since Apple has full access to Gemini, its student model can also learn to imitate the internal computations that Gemini uses to arrive at its answers, which can be more effective than just imitating the answers it spits out. This results in smaller models that roughly approximate the performance of their state-of-the-art teachers but require significantly less computing power to run.
Top comment by henhobimat
This further corroborates that Siri changes only come in iOS 27, which as soonest only is available in September
The Information’s source said that this can be a tricky process, since Apple’s goals for Siri don’t always align with Gemini’s specialties.
They also reiterate what we’ve heard before about Apple’s Foundation Models team not giving up on in-house models. However, it sounds very unclear what the AFM team’s current goals are.
Finally, the report affirms that Apple is planning to unveil its big Siri changes at WWDC this June, including “Siri’s ability to remember past conversations it had with a customer, or proactive features that could suggest they leave home to avoid traffic ahead of an airport pickup.”
How are you feeling about Apple’s AI deal with Google? Let us know in the comments.
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