It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.

If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.

Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?

Edit: they elaborated significantly in a "keynote tech-talk": [0]

According to Apple, there are five models:

On-Device

- AFM Core: Dense architecture; the standard next-gen on-device model

- AFM Core Advanced: Sparse architecture, natively multimodal; enables features like image understanding and expressive voices

Private Cloud Compute

- AFM Cloud: Workhorse server model optimized for latency and cost

- AFM Cloud Image: Image generation and editing

- AFM Cloud Pro: Most capable model, Gemini frontier-level quality, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks; runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud under Apple's PCC privacy guarantees

Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini. About Cloud Pro, they say "this is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frontier models." So I might read between the lines and say this is a wrapped Gemini.

  [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/08/craig-federighi-details-apples-collaboration-with-google-for-siri-ai-in-ios-27/

As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).

Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.

Apple -> Google -> xAI datacenter

see: Google to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/google-to-pay-spacex-920-mil...

Not sure what extra are we achieving here

Bundles that provide data and capabilities to iOS and Siri? And perhaps libraries of UI components to display and interact with said data?

But then, if that works really well, and gets strong adoption, why ever open the app? What’s the point of having navigation flows inside an app? Could one make entire apps solely dedicated to providing a set of data, capabilities, and UI components to the system?

In that world, what drives user retention, for such apps? What even is an app? App engagement disappears as well.

And that’s not even diving into the use-case of Siri, say, planning a trip across five different apps (flights, hotel, restaurants, whatever) using just App Intents. If done well.

In that world, do most apps just become plugins, providers for Siri?

If we disregard exploitation of the primary sources and focus purely on a use case, search summaries are it. Generative AI is completely useless and OpenAI and Anthropic will soon fail. The Segway is maybe fun for a day, then you ask yourself why the heck you aren't using a bike in the first place.

Sounds like OS architecture done right - screw the kickback business model.

This is one of the most cash rich companies in the world and it has failed to have any position in the most critical technology development perhaps ever.

It's a clear signal that Apple became the most incredible operational/execution company under Tim Cook, but lost its innovation leadership.

Gemini models clearly gaslight the user and hallucinate, they're also SUPER verbose, as shown in the demos from the keynote.

Plus, if they're not charging a subscription for this, you know we're getting the dumbest models...

Every mainstream product seems to have their own “SmarterChild on steroids” bolted on top (Gemini for Google, Rovo for jira, Copilot for Microsoft everything, etc).

I’ll still use the serious ones like ChatGPT/Claude as my main but I think these companies know that and are just trying to jump the bandwagon so they don’t look outdate. Either way, they can be surprisingly convenient and make up for UI/UX learning curves.

I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.

What a blunder, they resisted AI for like 2 years when it was all the buzz, and now when the bubble is about to bust and every user has AI fatigue they decide to finally dip into the fad?

Before it was as if avoiding AI was a conscious design decision, and if there was an AI crash, Apple would be the only survivor left. Now it feels like they weren't in on the meme out of incompetence and are now late to the party.

No one can know what Jobs' stance would be, but I like to think he would be anti-slop

Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.

Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.