Apple Intelligence: Designer Bonuses, Gemini Distillates, and iOS 27 Chatbots
With iOS 27, an improved Apple Intelligence is expected – including chatbot Siri. In the meantime, Apple is implementing a range of AI changes. An overview.
Apple Intelligence: Is progress slow?
(Image: Apple)
A lot is happening internally at Apple Intelligence and the AI modernization of Apple's voice assistant Siri. The company is reportedly working on integrating Google's Gemini technology into its Apple Foundation Models (AFM) and preparing a “real” chatbot Siri with an app for iOS 27. New media reports now show the direction this is all heading.
iPhone designers get (more) stock
Apple has recently been struggling massively with departures in its AI department. The Apple Intelligence team has lost several employees to Meta, OpenAI, and various AI startups. Apparently, frustration over slow progress was high, and competitors were luring with a lot of money, sometimes in the hundreds of millions. To prevent Apple employees from leaving the company, there have reportedly been additional payments. According to a Bloomberg report, the money initially went to iPhone hardware designers in the form of stock packages.
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This group, along with AI experts, is also considered at risk of being poached, including by Jony Ive's AI cooperation with OpenAI, where many Apple designers are already working. However, the sums paid to designers as bonuses were comparatively moderate: they are said to be worth between $200,000 and $400,000, and employees must remain at Apple for four years to receive the full amount. This is significantly less than, for example, the many millions that Meta paid a few months ago. According to Bloomberg, the new bonuses are paid in addition to regular “Stock Awards.”
Gemini as a distillate on the iPhone
Until now, it was unclear how deeply Apple would be allowed to integrate Google's Gemini into its AFMs. According to a report by the IT trade service The Information, the possibilities go surprisingly deep: Apple is reportedly allowed to create so-called distillates of the base model. In this process, the model is “downscaled” by transferring knowledge from a large model to a small one, which could then also be run on iPhones. Until now, it was unclear whether Google would allow Apple to do this. According to The Information, Apple has “full access” to Gemini. The company apparently relies on a combination of its models, smaller or distilled Gemini models, and Google's own cloud, where Gemini runs on the company's TPU servers.
Apple also apparently does not plan to force users to use Siri under iOS 27. According to another Bloomberg report, it will be possible to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT and possibly Anthropic's Claude. Gemini is also apparently intended as a chatbot. Siri will allow users to directly select which chatbot to address – there will be new “Extensions” for this, Bloomberg writes. The operating system should also be able to recognize whether chatbot apps are already running.
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