alt Hacker NewsApple picks Google's Gemini to power Siri
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If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly diversified revenue stream.
Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
Apple has seemingly confirmed that the Gemini models will run under their Private Cloud Compute and so presumably Google would not have access to Siri data.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...
Total capitulation by Apple.
This is a bit of a layer cake:
1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.
2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.
3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.
I think this is a good move for Apple. It avoids tying them directly to internalised beliefs in their own AI model, it avoids all the capex around building out an AI engine and associated DC, it reduces risk, and it keeps google in a relationship under contract which google will value, and probably value enough to think hard about stupid legal games regarding Playstore and walled gardens.
Apple plainly doesn't believe in the uplift and impending AGI doom. Nor do they believe there's no value in AI services. They just think for NOW at least they can buy in better than they can own.
But based on Apples VLSI longterm vision, on their other behaviours in times past with IPR in any space, they will ultimately take ownership.
Related: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri (71 points, 2 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826975
OpenAI had it, they had the foot in the door with their integration last year with Siri. But they dropped that ball and many other balls.
> After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models
Sounds like Apple Foundation Models aren't exactly foundational.
I think Apple is also more comfortable with Google than say an OpenAI due to the past relationship with the search deal.
This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!
Models are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just recognized that.
My experience with Gemini (3 Flash) has been pretty funny, not awful (but worse than Kimi K2 or GPT 5.2 Mini), but it's just so much worse at (or rather hyper focused on) following my custom instructions, I keep getting responses like:
The idiomatic "British" way of doing this ...
Alternatively, for an Imperial-style approach, ...
As a professional software engineer you really should ...
(Because I just have a short blurb about my educational background, career, and geography in there, which with every other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how to mkdir etc.)
It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting old now.
What happens to on-device intelligence? Does it stay a massive part of the Apple Intelligence offer? Or can we expect everything to be offloaded to the cloud?
Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone.
Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.
I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.
Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.
This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.
Yes, the Gemini models are really good right now—especially the image models. The Nano Banana Pro model looks super promising. I’m planning to integrate image generation into mobile apps and other platforms. Apple has massive distribution, but it still feels like they haven’t fully integrated this kind of tech yet, so users have to rely on third-party apps to get top-quality results.
At the moment, I’m using https://picxstudio.com to generate 4K-quality images with the Nano Banana Pro model, but my goal is to build my own app that delivers the same level of quality and control.
This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.
The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.
For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.
This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
The actual transactions around this deal will be interesting - will Google simply withold $1B from their search deal, will they pay it then Applepay it back (or a split). I doubt we’ll even know.
I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.
Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.
This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.
Really, Siri is an agent. Agents thrive when the subjacent model capabilities are higher, as it unlocks a series of other use cases that are hard to accomplish when the basic Natural Language Processing layer is weak.
The better the basic NLP tasks like named entity recognition, PoS tagging, Dependency Parsing, Semantic Role Labelling, Event Extraction, Constituency parsing, Classification/Categorization, Question Answering, etc, are implemented by the model layer, the farther you can go on implementing meaningful use-cases in your agent.
Apple can now concentrate on making Siri a really useful and powerful agent.
Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.
I’m a long time Android user and almost switched to iPhone last year. Mostly because I use macOS and wanted better integration and also wanted to try it. Another big factor was the AI assistant. I stayed with Android because I think Google will win here. Apple will probably avoid losing users to their biggest competitor by reaching rough parity using the same models
How soon does elon sue them for not choosing xai? He's gonna cry some nonsense about antitrust just like he did last year when apple partnered with openai for apple intelligence opt-in.
This seems like a pretty significant anti-trust issue. One of the two mobile OS makers is using a product from the other for its AI assistance. And that means that basically all mobile devices will be using the same AI technology.
I don't expect the current US government to do anything about it though.
This is good for Siri, in many ways. But I was kind of hoping we would see a time soon when phone hardware became good enough to do nearly 100% of the Siri-level tasks locally rather than needing Internet access.
Apple and Google already have the search relationship. Makes sense for this to happen. Am curious what kind of data Google gets out of the deal.
I don't understand why Apple cannot implement their own LLM at the user phone level for easy pickings? like settings control? or app-specific shortcuts? or local data searching?
I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia information, etc require external data sets, and transferring over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.
"Google already pays Apple billions each year to be the default search engine on iPhones. But that lucrative partnership briefly came into question after Google was found to hold an illegal internet search monopoly.
In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business.
The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such as the one with Apple."
How much is Google paying Apple now
If these anti-competitive agreements^1 were public,^2 headlines could be something like,
(A) "Apple agrees to use Google's Gemini for AI-powered Siri for $[payment amount]"
Instead, headlines are something like,
(B) "Apple picks Google's Gemini to run Ai-powered Siri"
1. In other words, they are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects
2. Neither CNBC nor I are suggesting that there is any requirement for the parties to make these agreements public. I am presenting a hypothetical relating to headlilnes, (A) versus (B), as indicated by the words "If" and "could"
So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with Google.
Does anyone know what Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" servers actually are? I recall murmurings about racked M chips or some custom datacenter-only variant?
I'm really curious how Apple is bridging the gap between consumer silicon and the datacenter scale stack they must have to run a customized Gemini model for millions of users.
RDMA over Thunderbolt is cool for small lab clusters but they must be using something else in the datacenter, right?
This is the sad state of Apple right now. It is ridiculous that they basically had unlimited access to TSMC and achieved nothing in AI. Management is a joke.
" ... and Anthropic’s Clause."
That will be their contract writing AI.
can they ask siri to fix the tahoe catastrophe please
I wonder if this will my original homepods interesting to talk to or if they won't provide this on older devices.
given that gemini 3 pro is presumably a relatively small model it wouldn't be too surprising to see an even more optimized model fit into latest iphones. I wish we knew the data behind gemini 3 flash because if my estimation that it's <50b is true, holy shit.
Is the era of Apple exceptionalism over? Has it been over for a while now?
I guess this is just a continuation of the Search deal, and an admission that LLMs are replacing search.
I can't wait for gemini to lecture me why I should throw away my android
I like it. I like Gemini.
Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?
It's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.
They already use GCP for storage so I guess there is some precedent for big ties between them
The question we're all waiting for ... for how many billions?
Oh God, please do this tomorrow.
Will Apple and Google merge now? That would create a new #1, bigger than NVidia.
It would take US antitrust approval, but under Trump, that's for sale.
Apple picks [ad company's] [ai ad server] to power Siri.
It tells you how bad their product management and engineering team is that they haven’t just decided to kill Siri and start from scratch. Siri is utterly awful and that’s an understatement, for at least half a decade.
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
It's a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.