Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.

Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.

To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?

It's a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...

1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.

2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.

3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.

Apple plainly doesn't believe in the uplift and impending AGI doom. Nor do they believe there's no value in AI services. They just think for NOW at least they can buy in better than they can own.

But based on Apples VLSI longterm vision, on their other behaviours in times past with IPR in any space, they will ultimately take ownership.

The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.

For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.

Sounds like Apple Foundation Models aren't exactly foundational.

    The idiomatic "British" way of doing this ...

    Alternatively, for an Imperial-style approach, ...

    As a professional software engineer you really should ...

(Because I just have a short blurb about my educational background, career, and geography in there, which with every other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how to mkdir etc.)

It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting old now.

Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.

But I saw something else in that statement. Is there going to be some quantized version of Gemini tailored to run on-device on an M4? If so, that would catapult Apple into an entirely new category merging consumer hardware with frontier models.

The better the basic NLP tasks like named entity recognition, PoS tagging, Dependency Parsing, Semantic Role Labelling, Event Extraction, Constituency parsing, Classification/Categorization, Question Answering, etc, are implemented by the model layer, the farther you can go on implementing meaningful use-cases in your agent.

Apple can now concentrate on making Siri a really useful and powerful agent.

Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn't there be talk within the industry that this form of AI assistant would soon be looked at as useless?

Am I missing something?

Amazon/AWS was trying to push its partnership with Apple hard once that was revealed, including vague references to doing AI things, but AWS is just way to far behind at this point so looks like they lost out here to Google/GCP.

I didn't realize that Apple could possibly be more stupid in their strategy with AI, but now they've given the game to their biggest competitor in every arena in which they compete.

It's truly amazing how badly they've flubbed it.

Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?

> Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

... https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

That will be their contract writing AI.

I'm really curious how Apple is bridging the gap between consumer silicon and the datacenter scale stack they must have to run a customized Gemini model for millions of users.

RDMA over Thunderbolt is cool for small lab clusters but they must be using something else in the datacenter, right?

I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia information, etc require external data sets, and transferring over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.

Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.

This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.

Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426643

In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business.

The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such as the one with Apple."

How much is Google paying Apple now

If these anti-competitive agreements^1 were public,^2 headlines could be something like,

(A) "Apple agrees to use Google's Gemini for AI-powered Siri for $[payment amount]"

Instead, headlines are something like,

(B) "Apple picks Google's Gemini to run Ai-powered Siri"

1. In other words, they are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects

2. Neither CNBC nor I are suggesting that there is any requirement for the parties to make these agreements public. I am presenting a hypothetical relating to headlilnes, (A) versus (B), as indicated by the words "If" and "could"

Oh, well. What could have been great.

I can't wait for gemini to lecture me why I should throw away my android

By the way, have any of you ever tried to delete and disabled Siri’s iCloud backup? You can’t do it.

I don't expect the current US government to do anything about it though.

On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.

On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.

It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.

It would take US antitrust approval, but under Trump, that's for sale.