[prossercj]

This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.

[purplecats]

> wound Apple's pride

do businesses really "think" in a personified manner as this? isnt it just what the accounting resolves to as the optimal path?

[lxgr]

Despite decades of efforts to reduce individual accountability in corporations to zero, companies (as social groupings) definitely still have some sense of identity that shines through in decisions.

[Andrex]

The C-levels leading the companies might, and the tech CEOs in question have been at the helm for a long enough while to build up some emotional feelings.

[blitzar]

> tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing

Yet at the same time google have the worst offering of all the major players (all starting up out of thin air) in this space.

It doesnt really matter anyway, the LLM is a commodity piece of tech, the interface is what matters and apple should focus on making that rather than worry about scraping the entire internet for training data and spending a trillion on GPUs

[lxgr]

> Yet at the same time google have the worst offering of all the major players (all starting up out of thin air) in this space.

Is that so? Gemini Models (including Nano Banana), in my experience, are very good, and are kneecapped only by Google’s patronizing guardrails. (They will regularly refuse all kinds of things that GPT and Claude don’t bat a weight at, and I can often talk them out of the refusal eventually, which makes no sense at all.)

That’s not something Apple necessarily has to replicate in their implementation (although if there’s one company I’d trust to go above and beyond on that, it’s Apple).

[antipaul]

I’m not sure. It could be a way to save a ton of money. Look at the investments non-Apple tech companies are making on data centers & compute.

Maybe paying Google a billion a year is still a lot cheaper?

Apple famously tries to focus on only a few things.

Still, they will continue working on their own LLM and plug it in when ready.

Edit: compare to another comment about Wang-units of currency

[mgrandl]

Well they would still be running the google models in Apple DCs. I doubt this is a very cost efficient deal for them.

[jb1991]

I don't think it hurts their pride at all when they are taking tens of billions from Google so it can be the default search engine on iOS. So they give a little of that back to Google, it's still clear who is doing well in this arrangement between the two companies.

[nsonha]

> that Google is just better at this kind of thing

That might be true but Siri sucks so bad it doesn't matter. It uses GPT but the quality is OSS models' level.

[NaomiLehman]

As of its fiscal quarter ending September 2025 Apple had $35.93 billion in cash and cash equivalents.