Comment by kenjackson
3 days ago
Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.
3 days ago
Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.
It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity.
Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.
Apple has been using ML in their products for years, to the point that they dedicated parts of their custom silicon for it before the LLM craze. They clearly have some in-house ML talent, but I suppose LLM talent may be a different question.
I’m wondering if this is a way to shift blame for issues. It was mentioned in an interview that what they built internally wasn’t good enough, presumably due to hallucinations… but every AI does that. They know customers have a low tolerance for mistakes and any issues will quickly become a meme (see the Apple Maps launch). If the technology is inherently flawed, where it will never live up to their standards, if they outsource it, they can point to Google as the source of the failings. If things get better down the road and they can improve by pivoting away from Google, they’ll look better and it will make Google look bad. This could be the long game.
They may also save a fortune in training their own models, if they don’t plan to directly try to monetize the AI, and simply have it as a value add for existing customers. Not to mention staying out of hot water related to stealing art for training data, as a company heavily used by artists.
I agree that they don't appear poised to do it themselves. But why not work with Meta or OpenAI (maybe a bit more questionable with MS) or some other player, rather than Google?
The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter. Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.
With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now, without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.
So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.
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Apple has surprisingly good quality AI papers, a lot of work on bridging research and product.
hey Siri, search Apple papers about AI.
> AI is such a core part of the experience
For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.
For the shareholders, the only ones that really matter
They could use it like Google Search, not as the first thing the user sees, but as a fallback
Web search is a core part of browsing and Apple is Google's biggest competitor in browsers. Google is paying Apple about 25x for integrating Google Search in Safari as Apple will be paying Google to integrate Google's LLMs into Siri. If you think depending on your competitor is a problem, you should really look into web search where all the real money is today.
How much of the two revenue streams overlap in reality?