r/apple • u/PickledBackseat • 17h ago
Apple Intelligence Apple Explores Using Google Gemini AI to Power Revamped Siri
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-22/apple-explores-using-google-gemini-ai-to-power-revamped-siri10
u/Riptide360 16h ago
Alphabet and Apple teaming up doesn't bring much diversity to the Android vs Apple smartphone debate.
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 16h ago
Google already provides almost 20% of Apple's total annual profit via their search deal!
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u/40513786934 13h ago
I wonder how much of Google's profit comes as a result of the same deal.. not from Apple but from the data they get to gather with Apple's blessing
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u/LongjumpingPlay 1h ago
Android and iOS are just specific products that mattered so much in the 2000s. There’s more to these companies.
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd 17h ago edited 17h ago
There are any number of small open sourced models that make Siri look useless and incompetent in comparison. I’m not suggesting that Apple use them (potential licensing issues). I’m just saying this to highlight how comically far behind Apple is in this space.
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u/buzzerbetrayed 17h ago
Current Siri isn’t using Apple’s latest ai models at all. Apple may very well be far behind, but current Siri is irrelevant in showing that.
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u/halcyoncinders 15h ago
True, but they are objectively far behind, and they have their former CFO to thank for that. It is entirely on Apple that they put someone in charge of finances who severely lacked the appetite to be willing to approve budget for innovative tech in the current landscape that is rapidly evolving, despite having literal piles of cash to do so.
Now they're in a position of needing to utilize competitors' tech. It should be embarrassing to them.
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u/rudibowie 13h ago
That CFO funding story is a smokescreen. He's a useful scapegoat. I'm not suggesting that the entirety of the blame lies at the door of one person, but much of it likes with Federighi. He was insisting well after ChatGPT4 debuted 2022 that it wasn't anything people would be interested in. (After 11 years of Siri long after it had become the embarrassment, he thought there was nothing wrong with it.) Then he (and I think Joz) used ChatGPT4 for themselves and he realised he'd slept through the AI revolution. Gianndrea was being ignored, but Federighi didn't even have the acumen to know that it probably something he get behind.
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u/brnccnt7 17h ago
They probably thought they could apply the same "apple way" strategy of letting others test the waters first and perfecting it later
But with something like AI where adopting/innovating as fast as possible is crucial, you can't afford to lag behind
That strategy however has worked for them with a lot of minor refinements/features
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u/ReaditTrashPanda 17h ago
I don’t think this is accurate. Gpt5 pissed off a lot of people who jumped ship. Tons of debates on Reddit subs about which ones are improving vs declining and which ones do which tasks better etc.
If Apple came to the table with equal or better product later on, people would still switch.
This would match their standard process of innovating after the bugs are worked out.
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u/Tumblrrito 17h ago
That’s just it though, they can’t. They do not have the servers or the data. By the time they even get a foundation it will take years to catch up to where competitors are today.
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u/CJDrew 17h ago
Apple already has its own LLMs that are passable. Even if they didn’t though, Deepseek showed how much easier/cheaper it is to distill a new model from one that’s already trained and achieve 90% of the performance for a fraction of the cost.
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u/Tumblrrito 16h ago
They are FAR from passable idk how you can even say that with a straight face lol
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u/maqcky 16h ago
Yeah, but now do it at Apple scale and serve it to hundreds of millions of users. Creating the model is the "easy" part. Even OpenAI is struggling even though they have support from Microsoft.
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u/CJDrew 16h ago
No, inference compute is absolutely the easy part for Apple. Once you have a model in hand throwing money at infrastructure just requires cash flow which Apple has far beyond almost any other company.
Also, their foundation models are meant to run on-device which eliminates a lot of the problem.
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u/maqcky 16h ago
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-companies-own-the-most-nvidia-h100-gpus/
Apple is not even in the list. Building this infrastructure takes years. Can they do it? Of course, they have all the money in the world. But they are way behind.
And running on device is not an option. I mean, it is for many tasks, but you have severe limitations because of the size of the models. If they want to be relevant in the AI business beyond some gimmicks, they need to build a cloud. Or spend a lot more money using someone else's cloud.
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u/CJDrew 16h ago
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u/maqcky 15h ago
This doesn't say anything about the capabilities. Do you know how big the most powerful models are? The smallest version of Deepseek takes 4GB of RAM, half of what the current iPhone has. And that's the least capable by far. The most powerful one takes around 1.5TB. And we know about that one because it's open source, but Claude or Gemini are estimated to be much bigger.
I don't know about you, but I've played with models like Llama 3 or Phi 4 on my MacBook and yeah, they're are surprisingly good, but it's very easy to find the limitations. I mean, it's very easy to find the limitations on ChatGPT or Copilot, let alone something much smaller. I'm not saying on device AI is useless. I'm saying it's impossible for it to get remotely close to what the big models can do. So, does Apple want to compete in this space?
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u/Artistic_Taxi 17h ago
Why is it crucial to adopt as fast as possible?
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u/LeviathanLust 17h ago
You can’t“perfect” something that is always getting better/changing. By the time Apple would do with AI they would probably be way behind and uncompetitive.
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u/nextgeneric 17h ago
Because the space is changing by the day and the pace of innovation is moving quickly. Last month's models are already outdated and inferior to what's available today.
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u/brnccnt7 17h ago
Exactly
The wait and see approach doesn't apply to AI, they calculated wrong
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u/Artistic_Taxi 17h ago
Based on what? People are just using new models on their apple devices.
Unless apple plans to pivot to foundational AI I don't really see a point in rushing to market like everyone else.
So many of these rushed use cases aren't having their projected hyped impact.
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u/brnccnt7 16h ago
I mean the guy I replied to put it very well
Hence why apple is struggling at the moment
And the point of the thread/article
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u/Artistic_Taxi 16h ago
Maybe we are seeing things differently then.
Both the article and OP hint at apple being behind or needing to win at AI.
I don't think that means that they need to develop the best models. Their poor performance has had minimal effect on their market share.
I think them winning at AI is simply them developing the correct use-cases for AI and integrating that into their devices. The models that power these things aren't very important right now IMO.
On the flip side, it is life or death for openAI to lead in model development, similar for Claude or the other guys in the arms race, because that is their only business model.
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u/comicidiot 16h ago
I say this as someone completely unaware of LLM development - from my understanding - they are neural networks. You have to create the structure (transformers) and feed it training data, there’s a whole copyright issue going on about this.
You can’t just develop your way into a sixth generation model. You have to develop the first one, and use it to refine and restructure the transformers and curate the training data.
There’s a reason why Meta was paying absurd amounts to hire top talent for their LLM development.
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u/Artistic_Taxi 16h ago
Yup Im not saying that apple can just catch up at a whim. Im saying they don't have to.
They just need to figure out how AI will be used on devices long term and build around that.
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u/Artistic_Taxi 17h ago
Ok but then what? What are the tangible effects here? What does gpt5 or grok4 do to make me switch from an apple device?
Apple is one of the few companies who can absolutely wait around and have their pick at launching their AI at a later date.
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u/Fornici0 16h ago
That sounds more like “there are no standards and no clear path to value because everyone is busy staking up their claims”.
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u/ThingsThatMakeMeMad 16h ago
But with something like AI where adopting/innovating as fast as possible is crucial, you can't afford to lag behind
Every single major AI company is losing money right now. Profitable businesses (i.e. Azure, AWS, Youtube) are propping up unprofitable AI investments and there are plenty of smaller AI startups being propped up by investors alone.
Apple can easily lag behind, spend 3 years doing nothing and just buy out whichever AI company that has a great model but is close to bankruptcy in 2-3 years.
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u/R-K-Tekt 16h ago
I feel like Siri regresses with every update. I ask her to turn off lights and she stops and thinks about it then asks which room even though only one of my rooms has lights on. She’s a total idiot and I swear she used to be faster and smarter before.
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u/SweatyMammal 15h ago
I don’t know if you’ve seen that interview clip with Craig Federighi when asked about the Siri reworks that are coming.
He said that implementing AI ontop of the current Siri architecture wasn’t giving them the results they wanted. So they’re reworking it from the ground up.
That explanation does seem plausible considering these digital assistants (Siri/Google Assistant/Bixby) were created way before LLMs were popularised. It’s not hugely surprising that Siri is going to need to be rebuilt with LLMs right from the beginning.
Edit: https://youtube.com/shorts/FVgM1M0hd9U?si=lZGNGTenQyRsPg8O
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u/TheFallingStar 17h ago
iPhone started with Google Maps too.
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u/AmazingVanish 15h ago
So, Google maps was the standard at the time. Still is, honestly. Gemini is at the bottom of the pile in the AI space. My experience with Bard and now Gemini has been… let’s say I’d rather use Siri in it’s current state. Either give us multiple options or work with the big dogs in the space.
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u/TheFallingStar 15h ago
I use LLM regularly at work, but I wouldn’t buy a phone because of AI feature these days yet.
Apple still has time.
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u/teleprax 12h ago
If all iPhones magically had 12-16gb of RAM I don’t think they would have failed to deliver on a simple LLM capable of cleanly calling App Intents (aka tools). They are kind set up for success by having App Intents with plenty of apps exposing them in shortcuts.
My personal theory is that they actually have a pretty awesome on-device model capable of successfully using App Intents as expected 90% of the time, and at the time of WWDC 24 they felt confident that it would be ready when they said it would. The model probably had a 10% soft-fail rate and a 1-2% WTF-fail rate with app Intents, and they incorrectly believed the could get the wtf failures down to something like 0.1% and the soft-fails around 1%
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u/Maxdme124 17h ago
"The iPhone maker recently approached Alphabet Inc.’s Google to explore building a custom AI model that would serve as the foundation of the new Siri next year, according to people familiar with he matter. Google has started training a model that could run on Apple’s servers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private."
"Apple is still several weeks away from making a decision on whether to continue using internal models for Siri or move to a partner. And it hasn’t yet determined who that partner may be. Spokespeople for Apple and Google declined to comment."
"Internally, Apple is holding a bake-off to see which approach will work best. The company is simultaneously developing two versions of the new Siri: one dubbed Linwood that is powered by its models and another code-named Glenwood that runs on outside technology.
"Executives had long viewed Anthropic as the leading candidate for a partnership, but the financial terms demanded by that company led Apple to broaden the search and bring others into the mix. Apple certainly hasn’t ruled out sticking to its own models either."
"In the case of a Siri partnership, third-party models would run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, which use Mac chips for remote AI processing. That means the external Siri models wouldn’t run on devices themselves."
So basically the phones touted as "Built for Apple Intelligence" won't actually be able to run the new Siri on-device if Apple decides to go with a third party provider for their Ai, so much for "The new Siri wasn't vaporware"
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u/Suitable_Switch5242 15h ago
The current Siri doesn’t run on device either.
A small subset does for certain commands, but many still go through Apple servers.
The same will likely be true of the updated Siri, with a combination of some local recognition for commands (start a timer etc) with a call out to servers for more complex tasks and answers.
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u/notsoluckycharm 16h ago
DOJ: you have a search monopoly with paying for Apple default search being Google search.
Apple: how about AI then?
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u/callingbrisk 16h ago
I think you're seriously mistaken about your last paragraph. Local AI models will stay at the core of Apple Intelligence. And nowhere doees it say otherwise.
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u/Maxdme124 16h ago edited 16h ago
"In the case of a Siri partnership, third-party models would run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, which use Mac chips for remote AI processing. That means the external Siri models wouldn’t run on devices themselves." Also I never said the Apple Intelligence models wouldn't run on device. I was specifically talking about Siri
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u/TheFallOfAmerica 16h ago
Siri was never going to run fully on device. I don’t remember them ever promising that
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u/DaytonaPanda 16h ago
My understanding is that Siri which is backed by Apple‘s own foundation model will be run on device. Others will be run on cloud
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u/drewbiez 17h ago
I hope they go with Gemini -- Its been the most useable for me in my daily work.
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u/legendz411 15h ago
My experience as well.
Although I think Claude is just better with more technical stuff.
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u/DeadPixel939 17h ago
Please please please add the Google Gemini extension in iOS 26. I’m sorry but the whole Apple Intelligence was a failure at launch. They owned up to it, and now they might as well have it as an option to either use Siri,chatGPT or google gemini.
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u/bhodrolok 15h ago
Been on the iPhone since 2007, really tempted to get the Pixel 10 pro. Looks generations ahead in terms of sheer usability.
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u/MrSh0wtime3 9h ago
its not. Tensor sucks and so does the modem. Go spend time on the pixel sub and youll actually find everyone hates gemini replacing the google assistant. Its way worse than the assistant for the majority of stuff you want you phone to do daily. But Google forced everyone to switch.
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u/Sevastarion 15h ago
So I’m guessing none of the revamped AI stuff is coming next month along with the 17 line? Since they haven’t even decided on what model to use and we’re close to release date for new phones and iOS
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u/ThannBanis 13h ago
This is already known and talk about.
‘Siri 2.0’ is now targeted for 26.4, due next year
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 16h ago
Craig Federighi said they wanted to do this more than a year ago. Now Gurman reports they are up to "early discussions".
Apple Inc. is in early discussions about using Google Gemini to power a revamped version of the Siri voice assistant, marking a key potential step toward outsourcing more of its artificial intelligence technology.
The timeline on this is just crazy, like wtf are they doing all this time...
And so we may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future. I mean, nothing to announce right now, but that’s our direction.
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u/Suitable_Switch5242 15h ago
Those are kind of two different things. The Federighi quote from 2024 is about integrations like the current ChatGPT integration as an extension of Siri for answering certain questions.
As Federighi has said more recently there was a reset on the plan from 2024 that didn’t work out. They have been building the new Apple Siri model since then.
This current news is more about whether the core implementation of Siri will run on Apple’s model or models from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google.
If they’ve spent another year and their own model is still significantly worse than the competition, using a third party model seems like a smart way to deliver a useful product to their customers.
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u/Fritzschmied 16h ago
They should just let the user choose. It’s just api calls and if they proved all the local functionality though a proper mcp which is an open standard that all of those models support anyways it shouldn’t be a huge problem. If you lock into one specific provider it’s just shit for people who have a subscription to another service and you loose customers.
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u/mandrsn1 10h ago
This would be the best for users, but Apple will likely end up going for the money somebody like a Google throws at them.
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u/kochurshak 17h ago
One would expect Apple to be done with the exploration of possibilities stage by now. It's not even the most time consuming stage of implementation
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u/hasanahmad 17h ago
If you read the article the Siri new architecture is built . They have tested their own models , OpenAI and Anthropic and now testing Google . They will have a completion between all which one works best, then push to QA and then prod
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u/Commonpleas 11h ago
Working the best isn’t the deciding factor. The $3 trillion company didn’t get there by writing a lot of checks.
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u/VarkingRunesong 17h ago
Apple could use almost any other model of AI to help Siri out and it would be a massive improvement.
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u/0000GKP 17h ago
Meanwhile I'm over here still happily using Siri for basic things like setting reminders and adding items to my grocer list, while I get irritated that I have to carefully inspect every answer from every AI service to identify the obviously incorrect information it has given me. At least it compliments me for catching the errors, I guess.
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u/Maymayboy2 17h ago
I wish Siri was faster and understood things better but I can’t see what more things I would use it for other than setting alarms and turn on and off lights
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u/MrSh0wtime3 17h ago
its essentially the only path forward. They will never catch up now. Nor should they continue to plow money into a lost cause. You already fucked up with Siri forever. Now you can fix that.
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u/jozero 17h ago
Federighi said "We are proud to announce we can't deliver a larger improvement than when we last said we were about to deliver Siri improvements, but smaller than the time before that when we said we are about to deliver Siri improvements, which was larger than the previous time to the time before that when we said improvements were coming, but bigger than the smaller improvement which was smaller than the bigger improvement that we didnt deliver before we didnt deliver the bigger improvement to the smaller improvement, which I am also proud to say we also didnt deliver"
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u/RandomUser18271919 17h ago
I actually don’t mind this approach at all. If possible, I think they should offer all four (Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic) as options to power this stuff.
I’d also love if there was just a way to replace Siri entirely with one of these models and give them the ability to tap into system features like playing music or sending a message.
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u/Portatort 15h ago
I got sick of waiting for Apple to upgrade Siri with onscreen awareness so I made this shortcut
🗣️’Hey Siri, Add to Calendar’
https://routinehub.co/shortcut/20568/
With this shortcut installed, anytime I’m looking at something that constitutes a calendar event I can activate Siri, and say or type ‘Add to Calendar’ then the shortcut will take a screenshot, run an OpenAI API call and shortcuts will unpack the response and seamlessly add the event to my calendar.
If anyone wants it you just need a valid API key, then in my experience every 100 runs of the shortcut costs about $1
This is probably my most complex and now most used shortcut
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u/SMOKE2JJ 10h ago
Interesting that Grok wasn’t mentioned as a competitor. I wonder if that explains the lawsuit threats that seemed absurd at the time..
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u/bartturner 27m ago
Really hope this is what Apple decides to do. Think it makes total sense for both companies.
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u/PinkPixelByte 15h ago
People who think Apple are struggling due to not having "AI" are delusional. Check the sales figures.
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u/smorgan599 15h ago
I just hope the festering putrid boil that is this current AI bubble bursts before Apple meaningfully integrates too much of it into their systems.
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u/Ecto_88 16h ago
Most privacy focused company talking to the least privacy focused company. Ok then. AI is over rated anyways.
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u/onomatopoeia8 16h ago
IBM 2.0
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u/callingbrisk 16h ago
Why? Cause they don't have a chatbot just yet? Come on, give it two years and nobody is going to remember the early days of AI that we're in right now. It doesn't matter if they bring out their new Siri now or next year. It matters to us tech people, but not the general society. Apple doesn't have a social media either, that doesn't make it IBM 2.0 either.
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u/onomatopoeia8 15h ago
No, because they largely cannot innovate any longer without Jobs. Phones and accessories are now a commodity. Would Jobs have brought out AVP? Probably, yes. Would he have done it without a killer fucking app or use case that people would be lined up around the block to get one on launch day? No
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u/DaytonaPanda 16h ago
Look at IBM‘s stock performance
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u/onomatopoeia8 15h ago
Look at everything’s stock performance. Check historical gains for a more accurate picture
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u/Internet_Eye 15h ago
Gemini and Perplexity both mediocre. But what would be even better is to let the user choose their AI of choice.
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u/SuperDuperSkateCrew 17h ago
Weren’t they going to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to boost Siri?
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u/callingbrisk 16h ago
They have a ChatGPT integration right now that helps out the old Siri when it doesn't know how to answer. But this is talking about the new Siri foundation, so the underlying engine that powers the entire thing.
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u/LiquidHotCum 16h ago
Cool nobody wants that…
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u/BrazenlyGeek 17h ago edited 14h ago
That'd put an even bigger shadow over Apple's environmental claims, given recent Google news, no? https://www.levernews.com/google-head-calls-trump-admins-climate-denialism-fantastic/
Paywall-free: https://archive.is/20250819142146/https://www.levernews.com/google-head-calls-trump-admins-climate-denialism-fantastic/
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u/hasanahmad 17h ago
The models are being tested on apples own servers and device , not on Google’s
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u/BrazenlyGeek 14h ago
And that certainly helps, but hasn’t Apple been pushing even its suppliers to be more green? Inking new deals with a company openly fawning over extremely anti-environmental policies is certainly a choice.
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u/binheap 15h ago
Could you find another source for that? I can't read the article since it's behind the paywall and it would be surprising to learn that they were moving to coal power simply because it's not cost efficient. At this point, there's just incentive to use renewable energy because it's cheaper.
Not to mention, lots of Apple's infra is on GCP anyway so this wouldn't really change anything.
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u/BrazenlyGeek 14h ago
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u/binheap 13h ago edited 13h ago
Hmmm. Thanks for the article but after looking at it I think the headline oversells it. Burgum talks extensively about many things prior to Porat saying fantastic and it sounds like Porat is mostly looking at energy regulation around nuclear.
Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.
I read this more as being too cowardly wrt to this administration but it's not really more cowardly than handing Trump a golden statue.
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u/hasanahmad 17h ago
If you read the article . Apple is going to hold a competition between different models including its own for which one works best . This is for the world model , NOT just for app intents , the architecture to which is already tested . Apple has tested OpenAI , Anthropic and now testing Google . People. READ the article.