Comment by al_borland

Apple has been using ML in their products for years, to the point that they dedicated parts of their custom silicon for it before the LLM craze. They clearly have some in-house ML talent, but I suppose LLM talent may be a different question.

I’m wondering if this is a way to shift blame for issues. It was mentioned in an interview that what they built internally wasn’t good enough, presumably due to hallucinations… but every AI does that. They know customers have a low tolerance for mistakes and any issues will quickly become a meme (see the Apple Maps launch). If the technology is inherently flawed, where it will never live up to their standards, if they outsource it, they can point to Google as the source of the failings. If things get better down the road and they can improve by pivoting away from Google, they’ll look better and it will make Google look bad. This could be the long game.

They may also save a fortune in training their own models, if they don’t plan to directly try to monetize the AI, and simply have it as a value add for existing customers. Not to mention staying out of hot water related to stealing art for training data, as a company heavily used by artists.