Sorry, Siri: Apple may be eyeing Google Gemini for future iPhones Apple is reportedly working on a deal with Google to bring the Chocolate Factory's Gemini AI to iDevices, suggesting its own efforts to develop a suitable generative AI model have stalled. Citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the private discussions between Cupertino and Mountain View, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that …
Apparently this Gemeni thing works on Galaxy S24 phones which have 8GB RAM. Some people are guessing that the difference between the two Pixel phones might be memory bandwidth.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/google-says-the-ai-focused-pixel-8-cant-run-its-latest-smartphone-ai-models/
It seems as if the company had retained most of its negative practices, but has slowly abandoned its former privileged position of being an innovator and a trend-setter. Turning to Google on the AI front would be especially embarrassing when you consider the models that are openly available today. You'd think Apple would at least build something on them.
Could someone remind me what generative AI is again? from looking it online, all I can find (from Google, AWS, etc) is
"Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) is a type of AI that can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music." (AWS definition).
Why would I want this on a phone - which is basically a mobile media consumption device?
To introduce some variation in people.
Why have everybody over-enthusiastically gush at the same banal crap when each device owner could have entirely unique banal crap.
Ever hear a band swap a city name in the lyrics to the city they are playing in? Recognizing that their favourite band knows where they are tonight, whips the crowd into an adoring frenzy.
Likewise your favourite TicTok, uh, star, generating content directly for you. It's all you diapers and feeding tubes in this brave new world.
Interesting point: Fahrenheit 451 shows a very primitive user engagement, where there is no real personalisation for the viewer who obviously has no impact at all despite the claims. In the future, you could imagine a TV series where the story is adapted to the viewer, they can interact with the people on screen, and have some impact on the story. A bit like a real-life RPG.
There's already AI girlfriend chatbots...
Well I saw an advert the other day for a phone that could cut your face out of one image and drop it into another. (Presumably that's "AI" - i.e. ML - behind the scenes. It might even have been the Pixel Pro.)
You probably can't use that, but a certain princess most definitely could (and would)...
So Apple earlier this year quietly acquired a Canadian A.I. startup named Darwin A.I. Since Apple usually forces the shutdown of the website of the company they have bought and in the case of Darwin A.I. they have also done so I did some sleuthing on the World Wide Wibble (hence the icon ). It seems Darwin A.I.’s focus was two fold. ( 1 ) They have an A.I. finely tuned for CV in the production and cataloging of chip parts and manufacturing. Ok…could come in handy for Apple manufacturing I suppose. But then, more interestingly, there’s ( 2 ) what the former CEO of Darwin A.I. had to say about their reason for being …
Darwin CEO Sheldon Fernandez.
“Our technology uses ‘AI to build AI’, to make neural networks both smaller and explainable. This can be especially powerful when you want to put deep learning on edge-based devices such as phones, TV, watches, and cars.”
Other sites I could find that provided pre-Apple acquisition information on Darwin A.I. stated that co-founder Alexander Wong had this to say…
“Most of today’s AI applications (such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa) require massive computing resources in huge data centres. That limits the growth of AI because it can be impractical and costly to deploy new solutions. There are also privacy concerns, in medical AI applications for example, when sending data off-site.
The company’s GenSynth platform helps developers “generate compact yet powerful AI that sits completely on board, so that data can be processed in real-time on a device,” Wong says.”
Wong is now director of Apple’s A.I. department. Perhaps Darwin A.I.s GenSynth neural net training and size reduction tech will be used, in part, to shrink Google’s Bard down to reside comfortably inside Apple’s RAM constrained products ( though with the most capable NPU of any consumer device on the planet )
Adding some shite from Google to the iPhone?
Hell no. Siri is bad enough. At least I can nuke most of it. IF Google get their claws into the iPhone then it will like that Always On camera that was reported on earlier. Google will be getting real time telemetry from a billion phones. Hell No, a million times no.
I might just be forced to get one of those google spyware free android devices.
How is Apple going to make more money violating privacy? They make the majority of their money on hardware sales, the rest on services like App Store. They make a tiny pittance from advertising. They'd have to make Google/Facebook level of advertising money to have an impact on their earnings large enough to significantly move the stock price. Even if they wanted to do that, beating Google/Facebook at the game they've been played for two decades would be very very difficult.
Since Google has a well deserved reputation for wanting to hoover up as much data as they possibly can, Apple has a good niche in the market for "privacy". And they can help justify the prices they charge for their phones as entry to their more pro privacy platform.
The only really anti privacy thing they are doing is their search deal with Google, but users can easily switch their search to use something other than Google if they care about keep their search data away from Google. And because Google is so dominant in search, no doubt many iPhone users would choose Google even if Apple defaulted to something like DuckDuckGo, so I suppose Apple might as well get paid for that.
"How is Apple going to make more money violating privacy? They make the majority of their money on hardware sales, the rest on services like App Store. They make a tiny pittance from advertising. "
Well, by increasing that tiny pittance. Plenty of scope given the number of Apple devices out there. They wouldn't need to 'beat' Google and Facebook in the advertising game in order to bring in a lot of money
Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but jumping into bed with Google would hardly be a good sign.
It's rather amusing that there is always someone who will jump to defend the honour of the fruity company if anyone so much as questions something! They are a mega-wealthy international corporation - they do not need people to stick up for them on internet forums!
*power and thermal envelopes permitting.
Apple designs its own CPUs, mostly from scratch. Apple essentially owns all of the most bleeding-edge production capacity at TSMC. If their CPUs don't run whatever AI they want to throw onto their phones and tablets, they'll just happily build ones that will and then view that as a way to drive new device upgrade cycles.
They haven't done anything yet, and there have been stories in the past couple days about Apple buying nearly two dozen AI related companies in the past two years and filing patents for an advanced "multimodal" LLM that handles images and text simultaneously, something which AFAIK no currently public (and this isn't public either) LLM can do.
Maybe Apple just wants to leverage Google's LLM in certain circumstances where it is likely to be strong, like finding stuff on the web, and use theirs for everything else. Or use Google's until theirs is ready as they may want to avoid potential legal pitfalls around training by being more careful about what is used to train it which would take longer.
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