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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why everyone is so surprised by this. Google already provides the default search engine for iOS, and it's clear that Apple's on-device stuff is going to be years away. They don't have the infrastructure to do this themselves either, so they're going to need a partner. Steve Jobs always saw Apple and Google as natural partners, he just couldn't get over that Google launched Android.

I think Apple by now realizes that Android was a necessary defensive play by Google aimed not at them, but at Microsoft, so maybe this partnership could be revived. Probably going to be more difficult now in the current regulatory environment, however.

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While not immediately, ultimately Android was very explicitly a hedge against Apple, not Microsoft. Seems this became clear at Google near instantly after the iPhone announcement. Google actively shifted it's Android development toward touch screens directly as a result of the iPhone, for instance. By the 2010 Google IO keynote they made this explicit with Vic Gundottra's speech describing the mission of Android according to Andy Rubin (it's original creator): "If Google did not act, we faced a draconian future. A future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice. That's a future we don't want."

This was a reference to Steve Jobs, Apple, iPhone and AT&T (originally Cingular).

https://youtu.be/89xc_1Vv69k?si=1HkgjXT6P0ScuBZG

This is very surprising. Stability AI can do this with 100M total funding. Apple is a 3 trillion dollar company. Sounds incompetent

The reason for Apple to do this will be exactly why Microsoft is happy for OpenAI to provide the Models. If anything goes wrong it's not Apple or Microsoft's fault. It is the SaaS provider who is to blame. For apple this will mean Google's stock takes the hit while theirs remain unaffected. Unfortunately for OpenAI/MS, OpenAI is not public and so everyone is using MS as a proxy for trading on OAI. So if something goes wrong in the Bing/CoPilot world, MS stock will take the hit.

I was about to say just that.

And it's also why I doubt Apple would go with OAI, wouldn't want to depend on Microsoft's private money sink/flaky legal shield.

Given all the regulatory scrutiny on the Google-Apple search deal, I believe we'll get an option to choose the 'AI Backend' similar to how EU users get to choose Search Engine. In effect a lot more people are aware of Google logo than OpenAI so that's what most common people will choose, while maybe most tech-savy folks will end up choosing OpenAI. This will be Apple's way to hedge against any further regulation option and they get to market iPhone as a AI aggregator similar to the AppStore.

It either indicates Apple isn't sure it can catch up or that they simultaneously realize they need to provide these AI features but don't think AI as a marketing component will have the staying power to make the investment worth it.

I can't say I disagree very much, as the AI hype is quite overblown.

Or maybe Apple doesn't want to touch that mess of a copyright and IP infringing hellhole and subcontracting is the smart move?

That would also explain why they didn't pick something like Mistral or Stability. Newcomer with no strong legal dept can easily be tanked if people catch on that training infringes and legal winds change. Google is less likely to fail catastrophically when it comes to that.

they didnt seem afraid to touch music or movies, they have a lot of experience in that no?

Is Apple making profit out of generating and selling derivative works from music and movies without compensating the original authors? If not, I'm not sure how it relates to the current breed of generative AI.

that s my point - they have the most expertise on compensating authors when/if needed

Mine being that large language and diffusion models are trained on "whatever the heck is there, available for scraping on the broad internet, indiscriminately".

I don't think Apple's money or it being in bed with the Majors solves either side of "acknowledging authorship when none is provided/known", "obtaining formal consent for commercial use" or "fairly compensating a creators base" when it is larger than all humans on earth.

I agree that this is very different from traditional content agreements. Apple is a very conservative company. They may not want to be trailblazers when it comes to working out how compensation of creators is going to work in an AI context.

What appears to be happening right now is that Google, OpenAI, et.al. are negotiating individual agreements with large publishers if and when threatened with legal action.

I'm not sure this will be sufficient. There will be calls to introduce some sort of AI tax or other forms of collective compensation schemes to funnel money to independent creators, small businesses, museums, etc.

This is all very much up in the air and it will take many years if not decades to settle.

A lot of that happened when Steve Jobs was alive and a major shareholder in the Walt Disney Company.

I don't think Tim Cook has the same kind of connections, even if Apple is a much bigger company now.

Mistral has less than 50 people and they're less than a year old

Every product that any company needs is a choice between source/create. It's not more "competent" to build everything in house.

Apple is doing it, but doubt they'll use something in-house that's still very much a work in progress when they can actually get paid by Google to use Gemini this year.

But they don't have as strong model as GPT-4 or Gemini 1.5 Ultra.

How many users do they have though?

Everyone wants/wanted Google as a search engine because it was the best. No users thinks Gemini is the best. In fact it is being mocked by media right now.

Android is a direct competitor still.

So yes, very surprising.

I guess I'm no user!

Gemini is the best all-around AI tool I've used. It falls a bit on programming tasks, but I don't use it for that.

>It falls a bit on programming tasks, but I don't use it for that.

I suspect a lot of us mediocre coders probably are using these chat AIs primarily for this. ChatGPT's been a pretty solid replacement for what used to be Googling for "How do I do X in Y?" kind of queries. Obviously, that's not really what Siri needs to be.

I've been using Gemini in lieu of Google search where I'm asking a question I want an answer to rather than searching for a website. Microsoft is doing this with Bing, it tries to understand when you're searching for web sites and when you're searching for answers. I imagine Google will eventually integrate these offerings.

Where Microsoft's integrated approach presents challenges is Gemini provides for a conversational approach (context). If I ask a question and subsequently need to provide further clarification, I can just provide the clarification. I don't need to re-ask the entire edited question. It's amazing how fast I've become accustomed to this conversational approach.

WRT Apple, Siri has become irksome. She can't reliably handle basic tasks on your phone, much less general-purpose questions. At this point I think it's going to become the case that AI is a commodity, and I don't see what Apple gains by building their own commodity service.

What's surprising to me is not the partnership but that they are outsourcing AI to another company. This is a big minus for the future growth of Apple. Google will get better at its AI offerings while Apple will get weaker. I'm a bit shocked that Apple is in such a spot. I was sure they had a big AI initiative that they would shortly unveil. It seems now that it was wishful thinking on my part. In the past, Apple has been able to move forward by buying products that they can then improve by giving them the Apple treatment and selling them to their fans. AI takes so many resources I suspect they won't be able to buy their way into a killer new product. Apple has been stellar at hardware. I hope that they can keep up their hardware lead since they are blowing their AI offerings.

> I think Apple by now realizes that Android was a necessary defensive play by Google aimed not at them, but at Microsoft

Huh? Could you elaborate on this? Maybe I am missing some historical context, but it feels like Android is very much eating into Apple's market share, not into Microsoft's. How does this reasoning work out?

Windows Phone is dead. If that was Google’s play, it was very successful.

They did not have to do much though, Microsoft killed Windows Phone all on their own. Windows Phone 7 was pretty great, but Microsoft threw all early-adopters under the bus by then releasing Windows Phone 8. None of the Windows Phone 7 devices got an upgrade to WP8 and WP8 apps would not run on WP7.

I knew a bunch of folks who were very sour after how Microsoft handled WP7 -> WP8 and moved to other platforms. And these were the people that were championing Windows Phone.

That was actually the second time they through earlier users under the bus. I had a WP6 and was promised (at the time I bought it) that it would be upgraded to WP7 when that came out. Then Microsoft decided not to. Then they shit all over us by decided to shut down the app market. So my not even year-old phone became essentially worthless very quickly. I switched to Android and that was the last time I ever paid for a Microsoft product. It also turned me into an anti-advocate for Windows phones. I still cringe when I think of that perfectly good flagship (at the time) level hardware sitting worthless in a drawer

Google pays to be the default search engine.

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