Google Expects Gemini to Join Apple Intelligence in iOS 19
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Google’s Gemini could be the next AI extension to come to Apple Intelligence, with the possibility of the search giant signing a deal with Apple over the next few months.
While we saw evidence that Apple was prepping to add Gemini support earlier this year, Google’s top executive has now publicly stated that he’s expecting his company’s AI service to come to the iPhone later this year.
Bloomberg reports that Sundar Pichai, CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet, said during court proceedings that he is “hopeful that Gemini, which competes with ChatGPT, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products.”
Pichai said he’s been talking with Apple CEO Tim Cook throughout 2024 and expects the two companies to reach a deal by the middle of this year.
Apple Intelligence is primarily powered by Apple’s own large language models. However, when Apple unveiled its suite of AI features during last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), it candidly acknowledged that its LLMs are nowhere near ready to handle larger “world knowledge” type questions. To fill this gap, it announced a partnership with OpenAI for ChatGPT to handle the heavy lifting. Questions that Siri couldn’t answer properly on its own would be handed over to ChatGPT.
That hasn’t worked out as well as expected, with Siri still trying to answer some things by itself, providing answers that are often blatantly wrong or not as current as they should be. Thankfully, you can always prefix your Siri requests with “Ask ChatGPT” to ensure Siri gets out of the way and lets you talk to OpenAI’s much smarter chatbot instead. For example, when I asked Siri about the population of Toronto, it came up with census figures from 2021; when I prefixed my request with “Ask ChatGPT,” I got the latest data from 2024.
Still, Apple never expected OpenAI to be its only partner. When it presented the ChatGPT integration at WWDC, software chief Craig Federighi told everyone that Apple planned “to add support for other AI models in the future.”
We saw reports that Apple and Google were in talks as far back as early 2024, at least three months before Apple Intelligence officially launched. It’s unclear where those talks went, but they may have stalled for several reasons. While Gemini has improved in leaps and bounds over the past few months, ChatGPT was definitely the better option a year ago.
However, Apple also has some stringent privacy requirements for anyone it partners with. One of the groundbreaking things about the OpenAI partnership is that all requests sent to ChatGPT by Apple Intelligence are anonymized, so OpenAI doesn’t know where the request is even coming from, much less gathering personal information about you. OpenAI has also agreed that none of this anonymized data is used to train its AI models.
That changes if you choose to sign into a ChatGPT account in your Apple Intelligence settings. In that case, you get the benefit of your interactions being stored in your chat history, plus any perks from being a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, but OpenAI also gets to apply its privacy policy to your requests rather than Apple’s, since you’ve now effectively opted into their terms and conditions. It’s a reasonable compromise.
On the other hand, Google has always been a more data-hungry company. While Apple and Google have had several longstanding partnerships, including supporting Apple’s YouTube app on the early iPhone models and powering Apple Maps, there are plenty of areas where the two companies have failed to see eye-to-eye on privacy matters.
The primary reason that Apple Maps launched prematurely in 2012 was that Apple and Google couldn’t come to terms on data sharing. Apple wanted more efficient and up-to-date vector-based maps; in exchange, Google wanted Apple to supply location data on all its iPhone users. Even if that data was only about improving Google Maps, it was still a privacy line that Apple refused to cross on behalf of its customers.
Apple is undoubtedly holding Google to the same standards when it comes to Gemini. However, Pichai’s comments suggest that this isn’t a deal-breaker. When it does arrive, Gemini will likely fit into the same spot as ChatGPT as an “extension” to Apple Intelligence. However, it’s unclear whether users will have to pick one AI extension or if they’ll be able to use Gemini and ChatGPT interchangeably.
Either way, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out. According to Bloomberg, it’s likely that Apple will try to have enough of a deal in place by this year’s WWDC in June so that it can make the announcement as part of its unveiling of iOS 19.
