Apple Taps Google Gemini to Give Siri an AI Glow-Up

Apple’s AI-powered revamp of Siri will finally launch later this year, and the Cupertino giant has officially chosen Google’s Gemini to power it.

“Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology,” Google and Apple shared in a joint statement on Monday. “These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.”

Although Google is providing the technology, Apple’s AI features will continue to run on Private Cloud Compute, Apple’s own secure cloud-based system.

Bloomberg first reported in September of last year that Apple was looking to pay Google around $1 billion annually for a custom Gemini model, after weighing models from OpenAI and Anthropic. If the rest of that report also stands true, the new system is called World Knowledge Answers, a tool to create a search experience on Apple devices and summarize web searches, and may also be added to Safari and Spotlight.

When the news hit the markets, Google became the fourth company to breach the $4 trillion market value benchmark, only four months after it hit $3 trillion.

Google is proving itself to be a force to be reckoned with in the AI field. In November, the tech giant unveiled its latest Gemini model to a chorus of internet fanfare, with many praising the model as better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Not only is Google challenging OpenAI’s chatbot domination, it’s also putting up a fight against Nvidia’s hold over AI chips with its tensor processing units.

Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t been hitting remotely the same highs in artificial intelligence. Apple announced Apple Intelligence, its AI initiatives that include the AI-enhanced Siri in 2024. The AI Siri, dubbed “LLM Siri,” was supposed to arrive in early 2025, and Apple even released ads promoting the new iPhone with the AI-enhanced Siri capabilities, but the Cupertino giant had to push the reveal back at the last minute, in a move that disappointed fans, reportedly caused an internal rift at the company, led to an executive shakeup and even a federal lawsuit accusing the company of false advertising.

The fallout of the LLM Siri delay debacle pushed CEO Tim Cook to admit that Apple had fallen behind competitors in the AI race and start a complete overhaul of its research and development teams.

“Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook told employees in a rare all-hands meeting in August, according to Bloomberg, and called the AI revolution “as big or bigger” than the internet.

In the same call, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi promised that the new and renewed LLM Siri was getting “a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned.”

Apple’s future as a worthy competitor in the AI space is riding on the performance and reception of LLM Siri. That future will be determined later this year (though you can’t be sure with Apple’s track record of overpromising), and Apple has the help of Google, perhaps one of the hottest names in AI right now.