A restart of Apple’s voice assistant function is overdue: At WWDC 2024, Apple announced a revision that same year. The company postponed the start several times. Apple and Google recently announced that they wanted to work together on artificial intelligence: the Android developer’s Gemini LLM will form the basis of the next generation of Siri. According to an interview with Mark Gurman, this decision was made primarily for cost reasons. Internally, the group prefers Anthropic’s large language models. “Apple runs on Anthropic,” summarizes the Bloomberg analyst. The group makes extensive use of AI tools from its OpenAI competitor. Tailor-made variants of the Claude LLM ran on the company’s own servers, product development and internal tools were based on Anthropic. The agreement with Google only came about in the last three months, and only for cost reasons.
Tiered prices at Anthropic
The in-house favorite was too expensive to be considered as the basis for Siri. According to Gurman, Anthropic wanted several billion for the first year of a Claude-based Siri alone; In the following three years, the price of the license would double each time. This apparently seemed too expensive for Apple, even though the Claude LLMs had a lot of confidence internally.
Court decision cleared the way
Originally, Apple saw antitrust barriers to working with Google, Gurman said. But when a court decided that the cooperation between Apple and Google regarding search engine integration under iOS was harmless from a competition point of view, the way seemed clear for further cooperation.
A different provider for every purpose
Apple uses various LLMs. In the “Creator Studio” software subscription, OpenAI takes over the creation of Imagerythe Chinese version of Siri uses an LLM from Alibaba or Weibo, says Gurman. And then there are the in-house developments, which are summarized under the name “Apple Intelligence”: They are still part of the Apple operating systems to generate illustrations using local Foundation LLMs or to reformulate text – and have not left beta status.
