Report: LLM-Siri could be "powered by Gemini"

Apple once again appears to be interested in purchasing a large language model (LLM) for integration into Siri that does not originate from the company itself. Following speculation in July that the iPhone manufacturer could make use of the Anthropic shelf, a Bloomberg report now states that negotiations are underway with Google –, albeit at an "early stage". According to the report, Gemini could be used to implement the long-awaited LLM Siri, which is not expected before next year. Meanwhile, Apple is losing more and more employees in its own AI team.

Chatbot plus voice assistant not so simple

LLM-Siri means that the voice assistant will become much more conversational, allowing for deeper dialog. That would be more than Apple is currently officially planning: All that has been announced so far is a context-sensitive Siri that can access all of the user's iPhone data and, for the first time, also operate apps and read the screen. An LLM Siri would combine chatbot capabilities with the usual assistance functions, such as for the smart home, alarms or listening to music and podcasts. This is by no means technically simple, as you can see from Amazon's Alexa+. As the New York Times writes, this is tantamount to a brain transplant and sometimes leads to user confusion because things work completely differently than in the rigid command structure of old assistance systems.

According to Bloomberg, Apple is now considering outsourcing more of its AI system to third parties. Google is said to have been told off by Cupertino itself, according to informed sources. As a result, the search engine giant has begun training a model that could run on Apple's servers. However, it will take at least "weeks" before a decision is made as to whether Apple will switch from internal models to a partner. Neither Google nor Apple commented on the report. Apple is said to have recently tested its first model internally with a trillion parameters – Apple models currently only have a maximum of 150 billion parameters.

"Linwood" vs. "Glenwood"

In addition to the talks with Google, discussions were also held with Anthropic (as mentioned) and OpenAI. The latter has long been a partner with ChatGPT, while Apple plans to integrate GPT-5 into the iOS, iPadOS and macOS operating systems in the near future. Users can choose whether requests go directly to OpenAI, but this can also be turned off by default. Apple had massively reorganized its AI team and brought Vision Pro boss Mike Rockwell onto the team. AI boss John Giannandrea, who incidentally once came from Google, was partially disempowered as a result. However, Rockwell does not seem to have succeeded in getting the problems under control – at least not in terms of employee departures.

Various people, including the management level of the Apple Foundation Models team, migrated to Meta due to extremely high earning potential. The LLM-Siri is said to have different codenames: "Linwood" is the name of a variant with Apple's model and "Glenwood" is one that uses external technology. Anthropic is said to have been Apple's favorite candidate for a long time, but the AI start-up apparently demanded too much money with its Claude model. Apple therefore looked for a replacement. Google has long been a long-standing search partner of Apple and brings in 20 billion US dollars for the company every year. However, antitrust proceedings are currently underway in the USA that could put a stop to this deal.

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