The new iPhone AI features may be powered by Google’s Gemini platform

According to people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg revealed on Monday that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI services like Siri in a future iPhone software upgrade that will roll out later in 2024. Apple is said to have held comparable discussions with OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT.

A number of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered functions, such as picture creation and essay writing based on straightforward prompts, may be added to Apple’s smartphone with the possible integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18. The agreement’s branding and terms, however, have not yet been decided upon, and it is yet unclear how it will be implemented. It seems improbable that the firms will reveal any agreements before June, during Apple’s yearly Worldwide Developers Conference.

Gemini may also add new features to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant that has drawn a lot of attention for being unable to understand and answer complicated queries as well as more recent AI assistants that use large language models (LLMs). There have long been rumors that Apple is internally frustrated with Siri, along with possible solutions. 9to5Mac reported in January that OpenAI’s ChatGPT API was being used by Siri in tests that Apple had been running on a beta build of iOS 17.4.

Apple has also been working on its own AI models, as we have previously reported. These models include Apple GPT, a simple chatbot, and Ajax, a huge language model. But according to reports, the company’s LLM technology isn’t as advanced as that of competitors, so partnering with Google or another AI provider might be a better choice.

Similar to ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini is a language-based AI assistant that was released in December and has since received further updates. The larger Gemini models, according to many industry analysts, are about as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers ChatGPT’s subscription editions. Until recently, when Gemini Ultra and Claude 3 were out, OpenAI’s best model had a considerable advantage in terms of perceived LLM capabilities.

The AI sector may be greatly impacted by the possible alliance between Apple and Google, since Apple’s platform powers more than 2 billion active devices globally. If the deal is approved, it will strengthen the two firms’ current search arrangement, in which Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to make its search engine the default one for iPhones and other Apple products.

Bloomberg notes that the US Department of Justice is already pursuing the firms for their current search agreement, so regulators will probably be closely watching any future alliance between Apple and Google. Additionally, Apple is under pressure from the European Union to make it simpler for users to switch from Google as their default search engine.

With so much money at stake, OpenAI may suffer a significant setback in terms of popularizing its technology in a market with billions of users if Google is chosen for Apple’s cloud AI project. However, any agreement with Google or OpenAI might only be a temporary fix until Apple can improve its own LLM-based AI technology.