Apple yesterday confirmed reports that it was partnering with Google’s Gemini to provide the AI features for Siri and more.
The primary reason for the announcement couldn’t have been made any clearer by the way the company chose to release the news …
The reason for the announcement is obvious
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported that the new Siri will rely on Google Gemini models for its AI smarts. At the time, he believed the company might opt to keep this fact secret rather than explicitly reveal it. This was backed by a subsequent report saying that “some Apple leaders” believed that developing its own model didn’t make sense.
If you had any doubts about why the company made this decision, you have only to look at how the company revealed the information.
It didn’t issue a press release or pass the information to a tech site, but instead released it to CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer. In other words, this announcement was pitched not to Apple customers, but rather to investors who had been questioning when the company was finally going to get its AI act together.
It is, however, good news for both groups.
This is good news for Apple users
While this approach represents a radical departure from the idea of Apple developing its own AI models to power the new Siri, I last week argued that it would be the right approach.
With this approach, we get the best of what the leading AI companies can offer, coupled to Apple’s ironclad privacy guarantees. Given that privacy not performance is Apple’s USP when it comes to artificial intelligence, I can see no great value in Apple persisting in trying to develop its own models given the very slow rate of progress. My own view now, then, is that Apple should go full steam ahead on using the best available AI models running on its own PCC servers with its own privacy guarantees.
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