Is Siri Finally… Good? Apple Taps Google’s ‘Ultrapowerful’ AI for Major Upgrade

If you’ve ever been frustrated by Siri, Apple is making a massive $1 billion bet to fix it. The company is tapping its rival, Google, to use its “ultrapowerful” 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini AI as the new “behind-the-scenes” engine for the assistant.

This move comes after Apple’s own 150-billion parameter models were deemed insufficient for the “Glenwood” project, the internal effort to fix Siri. An extensive “bake-off” saw Google’s AI beat offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic for the job.

The new Siri, codenamed “Linwood,” will be a hybrid. For simple tasks, it will still be Apple’s tech. But for complex, multi-step “summariser” and “planner” functions, it will be all Google. This is a monumental upgrade in raw processing power.

For Apple, this is a reluctant “interim solution,” admitting it has fallen behind in the AI arms race. Top executives Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell are overseeing the project, tasked with delivering a competitive assistant, even if it means using a rival’s tech.

Privacy is paramount in the deal. The Gemini model will be hosted on Apple’s “walled-off” Private Cloud Compute servers, not Google’s. This means Google gets its $1 billion, but no access to user data, allowing Apple to maintain its core privacy pledge.