At WWDC, Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri powered by a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model — a partnership with Google that had been in the works since early this year. According to Bloomberg, the deal costs roughly a billion dollars a year. Heavy queries go to Google's servers, simple ones stay on-device. Siri will become a standalone app living in the Dynamic Island and will be able to hand off complex questions to Claude or ChatGPT.
You can't actually try any of this yet. Today was just a demo — the public beta arrives in September with iOS 27.
Analysts are lukewarm. Min-Chi Kuo (Apple analyst, KGI Securities) warned that matching Gemini parity alone won't impress anyone — and Gemini itself has fallen well behind the competition.
For that same Siri Apple promised back in 2024 and never shipped, the company paid out $250 million in a class-action settlement in May. And this was all presented by an outgoing team: it was Tim Cook's last keynote as CEO. Apple's big AI breakthrough, in the end, runs on someone else's model.