In the middle of January Apple sprung a surprise after announcing that it would finally pick up Google’s Gemini as the core that will drive its AI services, including Siri. According to a joint statement from these companies: “Apple has determined that Google Al technology is the most effective foundation for Apple Foundation models.”
Apple’s decision to use external technology marks a reversal in its historic strategy of vertical control. According to industry reports, the company has evaluated various options, including models OpenAI, Confusion y Anthropic, before choosing Gemini as the main technical component.
This election responds to the need to accelerate the development of advanced features such as text synthesis, context response generation, and multimodal understanding, areas where Apple had a competitive lag compared to other players in the technology sector.
At the same time This is a boost and recognition of Google’s AI strategy. By the way, although this is a long-term agreement and although neither Apple nor Google has published specific figures, Bloomberg analysts have estimated that this agreement will bring almost $1 billion annually.
What is different about Gemini under Apple?
Unlike the standard Gemini service available to the general public, the implementation on Apple devices will operate under a white label model. This means that Gemini will act as a training and support engine in the background, but the interaction with the end user will remain under the Siri brand and the Apple Intelligence interface.
The technical architecture will allow Gemini to help shape Apple’s own models, which will work in a hybrid mode between the device’s hardware and specialized servers.
Returning to the joint statement of these companies, it says: “Apple Intelligence will continue to work on Apple devices and Private cloud computing, maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.”
In other words, privacy is a key differentiator in this alliance. Apple has designed this system so that user data is not directly managed by Google or used to train public models. Processing will be carried out through Private Cloud Compute, a private cloud computing system that guarantees security standards where personal information remains inaccessible even to the infrastructure provider.
From competition to dependence
The relationship between Apple and Google is often described by the term “enemies“because of their duality as commercial allies and direct competitors. At the start of the iPhone, in 2007, both companies worked closely together; even, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, served on Apple’s board of directors. At this stage, services such as Google Maps and YouTube were pre-installed from the factory, establishing Google as an important service provider for Apple hardware.
That affinity ended abruptly with the rise of Android. Steve Jobs considered the development of this operating system a personal and professional betrayal, going so far as to declare that he would start “thermonuclear war” against a Google product for what it considered to be iOS plagiarism.
Starting in 2012, Apple began removing Google’s native apps from its operating system and launched its own services.such as Apple Maps, in an attempt to reduce its reliance on a competitor that already dominated much of the mobile market.
But despite their public rivalry, the two companies maintained a huge financial connection through search. According to Bernstein analysts, Google pays between $15,000 and $20,000 million annually remain the default search engine in Safari.
The future of market cooperation
The impact of this alliance extends to the competitive landscape of generative artificial intelligence. By adopting Gemini, Google managed to embed its technology in more than one billion Apple devices, giving it a mass adoption advantage over Microsoft and OpenAI. For Google, this contract is a confirmation of the power of its artificial intelligence model, also ensuring that a significant portion of future request traffic passes through your computer systems.
For users, the near future promises a much more active voice assistant. Siri will evolve from a basic command system to a response mechanism capable of complex actions such as managing calendars, composing e-mails with different tones, or securely interacting with personal data. This device usability improvement aims to encourage hardware upgrades, allowing Apple to stay relevant in an era where artificial intelligence software is a major driver of sales.
However, this relationship also faces significant regulatory challenges. The US Department of Justice and other international organizations They keep Google Apple payments under close scrutiny, arguing that these agreements strengthen the monopoly in the search sector. Changes in the law could force both companies to restructure their financial arrangements, putting billions of dollars in annual revenue at risk.
In the long run, Apple seems to be in the position of exemplary orchestrator. While Gemini is the current core, the company also maintains non-exclusive agreements that allow it to integrate other players, such as ChatGPT, for specific tasks. This diversification strategy assumes that while Google provides the basic infrastructure, Apple will focus on improving the user experience and deep integration with its operating systems, thus maintaining the autonomy of its brand.
What do you think of this alliance?
