Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Monday, March 18th.
I thought this was going to be a quiet week as I started to put this issue together, but then, well, it wasn’t. Let’s just get into it.
Huge story overnight from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry.
The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.
Tim Cook has already promised that Apple would unveil major generative AI features this year, with the presumption being that they’d form part of the traditional operating system announcements at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. I had been expecting Apple to roll out a sort of next-gen LLM-based Siri that had been developed in-house, but Gurman’s report suggests that the plans are quite different.
Apple is preparing new capabilities as part of iOS 18 — the next version of the iPhone operating system — based on its own AI models. But those enhancements will be focused on features that operate on its devices, rather than ones delivered via the cloud. So Apple is seeking a partner to do the heavy lifting of generative AI, including functions for creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts.
Spokespeople for Apple and Google declined to comment. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since early last year, Apple has been testing its own large language model — the technology behind generative AI — codenamed Ajax. Some employees also have been trying out a basic chatbot dubbed Apple GPT. But Apple’s technology remains inferior to tools from Google and other rivals, according to the people, making a partnership look like the better option.
Gemini, of course, has been in the headlines of late because of the controversy that saw it render imagery of historical groups like Vikings and Nazis almost exclusively as people of colour. Aside from that embarrassing but presumably fixable issue — caused by inelegantly applied techniques designed to promote inclusivity — it doesn’t seem unlikely that Google is years ahead of Apple when it comes to the sort of generative AI product that would be useful on smartphones.
Apple also probably doesn’t have access to the sort of GPU infrastructure required to deploy this kind of service at scale. Its operations in the space are unlikely to involve Nvidia, a company that it has refused to acknowledge for the past decade-plus. And to be clear, iPhone-level scale is well beyond anything that existing generative AI-based consumer products have ever had to deal with.
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