Apple explores baking Google's Gemini into iOS

This sure would be a change of pace for Apple.

Updated August 24 to cite quote on AI firm decision-making.

Today, information leaked that Apple is considering a plethora of outside AI firms' models to bake into iOS, to go alongside the existing Apple Intelligence features and the AI Siri. This is most likely because of the AI fiasco last year surrounding Apple Intelligence.

Along with Google's Gemini AI assistant, Apple has been testing Claude and others in an internal "bake-off to see which approach will work best,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Anthropic, the maker of Claude AI, has been viewed internally as the best, but it could be too expensive for what the company is trying to achieve.

Either way, this is a little bit surprising in two key ways. The first way is that Apple never hires in outside help for their products, since they want to do it the Apple way. However, seeing as how bad things went this past year, it makes sense that they want to do things right.

But, on the flip side, Apple is the richest company in the world and can hire as many incredible and amazing employees to develop the next frontier of AI as they want. How can a little startup, or even Google beat Apple in this race?

The second key reason is that Apple already has ChatGPT integration inside of Siri. That has existed since Apple Intelligence was released in the fall of last year. The ChatGPT integration, however, only extends to answering questions and prompts, not changing settings, setting reminders, or other system-level actions.

Again, however, on the flip side, why couldn't Apple just extend the reach of ChatGPT into iOS and make it more system-wide?

There are obviously many questions to answer and things we won't ever know as Apple develops Apple Intelligence. We will have to see what Apple does later on.