Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to license its Gemini AI models to be the brain for its long-awaited revamped Siri, as the company plays catch-up with the generative AI industry. The potential partnership represents a huge change for Apple, which has historically preferred to develop its core technologies by itself.
At this point, you must have heard about Apple"s struggles to ship its ambitious update to Siri, which uses generative AI. The updated assistant was originally set for a spring release but was postponed by a year due to persistent engineering problems.
The core issue has been the incredible difficulty of merging Siri"s ancient, clunky codebase with modern large language models. It certainly does not help that the company has lost several key AI talents like Ruoming Pang, the chief architect of its AI models team, who jumped ship to Meta for a reported $200 million package (thanks, Mark Zuckerberg!).
According to Bloomberg"s Mark Gurman, this custom model could be trained to run on Apple servers for added privacy.
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.
Inside Apple, the company is currently split between using a partner and developing it in-house, so the company decided to just build two versions of the assistant to see what sticks.
Internally, the in-house version is code-named Linwood, while the one based on potentially outsourced models from a partner is called Glenwood. This internal "bake-off" allows Apple to directly compare its own progress against what a competitor can offer.
Before speaking with Google, Apple was reportedly in discussions with Anthropic and OpenAI to license their Claude or ChatGPT models. Apple executives apparently favored Anthropic"s Claude model after internal testing, but the talks stalled over money. The AI startup wanted a multi-billion-dollar annual fee that would only get bigger each year, a price Apple was not willing to pay.