In a move that highlights the pragmatic realities of the AI landscape, bitter rivals Apple and Google have forged a $1 billion-a-year partnership. Google’s advanced Gemini AI model will now serve as a core component of Apple’s reimagined Siri assistant.
This alliance is an “interim solution” for Apple, which has publicly lagged in generative AI. The “Glenwood” project, Apple’s internal effort to fix Siri, requires capabilities beyond its current 150-billion parameter models. The new “Linwood” Siri will use Google’s 1.2 trillion parameter model for complex, multi-step tasks.
For Google, this is a masterful stroke, establishing it as an “AI supplier” even to its biggest competitor. Following a “bake-off” where Gemini outperformed all comers, including OpenAI, Google now gets $1 billion annually and a massive foothold in the Apple ecosystem.
The new Siri will be a hybrid. Apple’s tech will handle basic requests, but for complex “planner” and “summariser” functions, Siri will pass the request to Google’s Gemini. Apple is pushing its own teams to build a 1 trillion parameter replacement, but this could take years.
The critical piece of this deal is privacy. To maintain its brand promise, Apple will host the Gemini model on its own Private Cloud Compute servers. This “walled-off” architecture means Google gets the $1B fee, but zero access to Apple’s user data.
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