Comment by bredren
Comment by bredren a day ago
How about Apple? How is Apple training its next foundation models?
Comment by bredren a day ago
How about Apple? How is Apple training its next foundation models?
Do you mean like OCR in photos? In that case, yes, I didn't think about that. Are there other use cases aside from speach to text in Siri?
I think they are also used for translation, summarization, etc. They're also available to other apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels
Thanks, I am a dumb dumb about Apple, and mobile in general. I should have known this. I really appreciate the reply so that I know it now.
If they were taking that approach, they would have absolutely first-class integration between AI tools and user data, complete with proper isolation for security and privacy and convenient ways for users to give agents access to the right things. And they would bide their time for the right models to show up at the right price with the right privacy guarantees.
I see no evidence of this happening.
As an outsider, the only thing the two of you disagree on is timing. I probably side with the ‘time is running out’ team at the current juncture.
Arena mode! Which reply do you prefer? /s
But seriously, would one be for newer phone/tablet models, and one for older?
It sounds like the first one, based on Gemini, will be more a more limited version of the second ("competitive with Gemini 3"). IDK if the second is also based on Gemini, but I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.
Seems like it's more a ramp-up than two completely separate Siri replacements.
Apple can make more money from shorting the stock market, including their own stock, if they believe the bubble will deflate.
The options for a company in their position are:
1. Sit out and buy the tech you need from competitors.
2. Spend to the tune of ~$100B+ in infra and talent, with no guarantee that the effort will be successful.
Meta picked option 2, but Apple has always had great success with 1 (search partnership with Google, hardware partnerships with Samsung etc.) so they are applying the same philosophy to AI as well. Their core competency is building consumer devices, and they are happy to outsource everything else.
Well they tried and they failed. In that case maybe the smartest move is not to play. Looks like the technology is largely turning into a commodity in the long run anyways. So sitting this out and letting others make the mistakes first might not be the worst of all ideas.
This whole thread is about whether the most valuable startup of all time will be able to raise enough money to see the next calendar year.
It's definitely rational to decide to pay wholesale for LLMs given:
- consumer adoption is unclear. The "killer app" for OS integration has yet to ship by any vendor.
- owning SOTA foundation models can put you into a situation where you need to spend $100B with no clear return. This money gets spent up front regardless of how much value consumers derive from the product, or if they even use it at all. This is a lot of money!
- as apple has "missed" the last couple of years of the AI craze, there has been no meaningful ill effects to their business. Beyond the tech press, nobody cares yet.
I mean, they tried. They just tried and failed. It may work out for them, though — two years ago it looked like lift-off was likely, or at least possible, so having a frontier model was existential. Today it looks like you might be able to save many billions by being a fast follower. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lift-off narrative comes back around though; we still have maybe a decade until we really understand the best business model for LLMs and their siblings.
> I mean, they tried. They just tried and failed.
They tried to do something that probably would have looked like Copilot integration into Windows, and they chose not to do that, because they discovered that it sucked.
So, they failed in an internal sense, which is better than the externalized kind of failure that Microsoft experienced.
I think that the nut that hasn't been cracked is: how do you get LLMs to replace the OS shell and core set of apps that folks use. I think Microsoft is trying by shipping stuff that sucks and pissing off customers, while Apple tried internally declined to ship it. OpenClaw might be the most interesting stab in that direction, but even that doesn't feel like the last word on the subject.
I think you are right. Their generative AI was clearly underwhelming. They have been losing many staff from their AI team.
I’m not sure it matters though. They just had a stonking quarter. iPhone sales are surging ahead. Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
> Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
I would rather say their products didn’t just loose in value for not getting an improvement there. Everyone agrees that Siri sucks, but I’m pretty sure they tried to replace it with a natural language version built from the ground up, and realised it just didn’t work out yet: yes, they have a bad, but at least kinda-working voice assistant with lots of integrations into other apps. But replacing that with something that promises to do stuff and then does nothing, takes long to respond, and has less integrations due to the lack of keywords would have been a bad idea if the technology wasn’t there yet.
We do know that they made a number of promises on AI[1] and then had to roll them back because the results were so poor[2]. They then went on to fire the person responsible for this division[3].
That doesn't sound like a financial decision to me.
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2024/06/wwdc24-highlights/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-18/how-apple...
[3] https://nypost.com/2025/12/02/business/apple-shakes-up-ai-te...
From a technology standpoint I don’t feel Apple’s core competency is in AI model foundations
Sure, Siri is, but do people really buy their phone based off of a voice assistant? We're nowhere near having an AI-first UX a la "Her" and it's unclear we'll even go in that direction in the next 10 years.
They are in housing their AI to sell it as a secure way to AI, which 100% puts them in the lead for the foreseeable future.
To use the parlance of this thread: "next" foundation models is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Am I doing this right?
My point is, does Apple have any useful foundation models? Last I checked they made a deal with OpenAI, no wait, now with Google.