"Its first idea was to rerelease Siri, only this time with some modest, on-device LLM models looped in. This didn't amount to much - iOS devices aren't much easier to talk to than they were five or, remarkably, ten years ago - creating the impression that Apple was missing the AI wave. This sense temporarily drove down the company's stock price and led to some executive departures."
"This is a new deal but, in a broader sense, a straightforward continuation: Apple has been productively working with Google for many years, taking billions of dollars in payments in exchange for making Google the default search engine for iOS users. Apple could have built its own search engine, of course, but it never really saw the need. Its users seemed to want to use Google, Google was paying Apple, and Apple was making lots of money elsewhere."
Since ChatGPT, Apple pursued a confused AI strategy, first rereleasing Siri with modest on-device LLMs that produced little improvement. That created the impression Apple missed the AI wave, briefly depressing its stock and prompting executive departures. Apple sells hardware and add-on services and was not a natural competitor to OpenAI, which helped produce cautious, slow action after Siri overpromises. In 2026 Apple entered a multi-year collaboration with Google to base its next Foundation Models on Gemini and Google Cloud to power Apple Intelligence and a more personalized Siri. The deal continues a long commercial relationship in which Google paid Apple to be the default iOS search engine; surviving antitrust scrutiny helped justify the agreement.
Read at Intelligencer
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