Apple Nears $1B-A Year Deal to Use Google AI for Siri (www.bloomberg.com)

Reports say Apple is close to striking a deal to pay roughly $1 billion a year to license Google’s AI capabilities to power Siri. If confirmed, the arrangement would mark a major shift for Apple—outsourcing core natural‑language and conversational intelligence to a rival rather than building comparable models entirely in‑house—and accelerate a near‑term upgrade to Siri’s conversational fluency and comprehension. Technically, the pact likely means Siri will rely more on Google’s large‑language models and cloud inference APIs rather than only Apple’s on‑device systems, improving context handling, multi‑turn dialogue and search integration but raising questions about latency, bandwidth and how user prompts are routed and logged. For the AI community this underscores the rising value of production‑grade LLM infrastructure and the costs of scaling it, highlights tradeoffs between privacy and model performance (on‑device vs cloud), and could reshape competition among platform providers and search/ads economics. Watch for contract specifics on data sharing, model customization, and regulatory scrutiny given the ties between core OS features and third‑party AI services.