Apple’s AI-powered revamp of Siri is finally set to launch later this year, and the Cupertino giant has officially chosen Google’s Gemini to power it.
“Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year partnership in which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technologies,” Google and Apple shared in a joint statement on Monday. “These models will help future Apple Intelligence features, including the personal Siri coming this year.”
While Google provides the technology, Apple’s AI features will continue to run on Private Cloud Compute, Apple’s secure cloud-based system.
Bloomberg first reported in September of last year that Apple wanted to pay Google about $1 billion annually for a custom Gemini model, after weighing models from OpenAI and Anthropic. If all that report is true, the new program is called World Knowledge Answers, a tool to create search information on Apple devices and summarize web searches, and it may be added to Safari and Spotlight.
When the news hit the markets, Google became the fourth company to break the $4 trillion market value benchmark, just four months after it hit $3 trillion.
Google is proving to be a force to be reckoned with in the field of AI. In November, the tech giant unveiled its latest Gemini model to a chorus of internet fans, with many praising the model as better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Not only is Google challenging OpenAI’s Chatbot dominance, it’s also fighting Nvidia’s hold over its AI chips and tensor processing units.
At the time, Apple was nowhere near hitting the same level in artificial intelligence. Apple announced Apple Intelligence, its AI plans including an AI-enhanced Siri by 2024. AI Siri, called “LLM Siri,” was supposed to arrive in early 2025, and Apple even released ads promoting the new iPhone with Siri’s improved AI capabilities, but the Cupertino giant reported disappointing fans at the last minute. Disagreement in the company, led to a rebellion of officials and even a federal court accusing the company of false advertising.
The fallout from the LLM Siri delay controversy forced CEO Tim Cook to admit that Apple was lagging behind its competitors in the AI race and began to completely overhaul its research and development teams.
“Apple has to do this. Apple is going to do this. This is our brand that we have to embrace,” Cook told employees at a rare hands-on meeting in August, according to Bloomberg, and called AI transformation “as big or bigger” than the Internet.
In the same call, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi promised that the new and updated LLM Siri is getting “greater improvements than we thought.”
Apple’s future as a worthy competitor in the AI space rides on the performance and adoption of LLM Siri. That future will be decided later this year (though you can’t be sure with Apple’s track record of over-promising), and Apple has the help of Google, perhaps one of the hottest names in AI right now.
