Apple, it seems, has admitted defeat in the AI space. The iPhone-maker inked a new multi-year collaboration with Alphabet’s Google that will use its Gemini AI models to deliver the long-awaited Siri revamp in the coming year. The deal, which reportedly hovers around the $1 billion-per-year mark, places Google even more firmly in OpenAI’s sights as the two ramp up the battle for AI market dominance.
Hey Siri Google!
“After careful evaluation, Apple determined Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models,” Alphabet said, which smugly noted that its AI models would also power the Fruit Company’s other Apple Intelligence features, hype for which has stalled after key deadlines were missed.
How and when this new era for Siri will be ushered in remains to be seen, though the announcement was enough to bump both Apple and Alphabet’s share prices, with the latter topping $4 trillion. It wasn’t long ago when the Fruit Company enlisted OpenAI’s ChatGPT services to power the voice assistant, allowing users to take advantage of the chatbot’s brainpower for those harder-to-answer questions.
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In its joint statement, Google noted that Apple Intelligence will remain an Apple product, and “will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.”
The deal once again calls into question Alphabet’s monopolistic tendencies, which recently fought off similar accusations about its search business. “This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that [they] also have Android and Chrome,” said Elon Musk, who happens to own a competing AI company.
