Google and Apple may soon be teaming up on AI. During a court hearing on Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company is close to finalising a deal with Apple to bring its Gemini AI to iPhones. The deal could be finalised by mid-2025, with the rollout expected to be out by the end of this year.
If the deal goes through, Apple users could see Gemini powering certain features of Apple Intelligence, especially helping Siri answer more complex questions. This would work similarly to how Siri can already use OpenAI’s ChatGPT for some tasks.
The topic came up during an ongoing antitrust trial. DOJ lawyer Veronica Onyema questioned Pichai about possible plans involving Gemini and Apple. When asked if Google expects to strike a Gemini deal with Apple soon, Pichai responded, “Correct.” He also shared that he had met with Apple CEO Tim Cook to talk about AI development.
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“He [Cook] was trying to understand our plans for how we’re evolving AI technologies, our roadmap, and as part of that, we talked about the Gemini app distribution as well,” Pichai said, according to The Verge. He also noted that Cook mentioned Apple would support more third-party AI models on Apple Intelligence later this year.
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Hints of this partnership have been spotted earlier. In June last year, Apple’s senior vice president Craig Federighi had said, “We want to enable users ultimately to choose the models they want, maybe Google Gemini in the future.”
In February, more clues appeared when MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris found references to “Google” as a model choice in an iOS 18.4 beta version.
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