On Hacker News
Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models
644
points
486
comments
3
notable voices
The 5-second version
- Apple Intelligence is being rebuilt on foundation models co-developed with Google using Gemini technology, replacing or augmenting previous Apple-only models.
- A new system orchestrator coordinates AI features across platforms, enabling context-aware responses based on the active app and user task.
- Models run both on-device and via Private Cloud Compute, with Apple maintaining its privacy guarantees including no data retention and third-party verifiability.
- New capabilities include multimodal support (image understanding/generation), visual question answering, advanced photo editing, and realistic image creation.
- Higher-power model variants with speech generation and stronger NLU will be available on certain unspecified devices, suggesting tiered hardware requirements.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
How is this substantially different from Safari extensions that can effectively see and act upon everything you do in the browser? One can imagine contextual prompts for all of the examples that you give, like which data sources and which apps the AI provider is given access to — similar to how you can choose for a Safari extension which websites it has access to — and for how long. That all seams reasonably implementable. You could even use multiple AI providers in parallel with different sub…Read on HN ↗
Nvidia's moat is just around high-performance frontier models and CUDA. You can run smaller models on cheap commodity hardware. Your phone can probably run one of these: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ai.... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-ai-edge-gallery/id67496...Read on HN ↗
I agree that many AI businesses will go bust and they deserve it, but the tech is good. I can recommend my own layered approach, using the lowest capability models that get stuff done: 1. I maximally use local models like gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat for everything that works with this free option. 2. I like paying for inexpensive APIs for mid-tier models like deepseek v4 flash, gcp-5-mini, gemini-2-flash for things that option 1. fails at. This option is almost free. 3. Pay for more expensive APIs…Read on HN ↗
>(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this) You're right that it is orthogonal to the privacy promises Apple makes to its own users. The moralistic and righteous undertone in their marketing material is questionable though given that these Apple services might not exist if Google didn't exploit Gemini app user data on Android the way it does. That's fine with me. Users have a choice here. In fact, it's a big improvement over the search deal w…Read on HN ↗