[haritha-j]

Everyone assumes this is apple paying Google to use their stuff. But maybe its the other way around. Maybe this is the google search engine deal 2.0. i.e. Apple agrees to sell their customers to Google for money. I know that right now its supposed to run privately and all that, but its still Google's voice telling you things, not to mention intepreting your instructions.

[fennecbutt]

Lmao there is no way. Think about the economics of AI inference vs. Google search.

The latter was cheap and easily offset by ad views. The former is expensive, not to mention Apple has no internal prowess in this area atm.

And honestly? That's fine. One company shouldn't be "doing everything" no matter how desperately Apple wants that to be the case for itself.

[haritha-j]

Google right now offers plenty of AI inference for free for everyone on the planet. They also offered their £20 AI pro package for free for over a year for all students. I use that and its a very generous offering. Some more free AI inference for Apple users (where you've now selected for high income folk, simply by virtue of being Apple users) would make plenty of sense, I imagine.

[fauigerzigerk]

It makes no sense at all. Google offers free but limited Gemini in exchange for being able to train their models on user data.

They are also gradually introducing advertising to Gemini and they can upsell and cross sell their paid plans (Gemini, Google One, Youtube, Workspace) to a large pool of users across all their apps, platforms and integrations.

They can do none of that with the white label models they to rent to Apple. That's why Apple will always have to pay for it directly.

This is very different from the search deal Apple has with Google. Under that deal, Apple sends users straight to Google along with all the advertising revenue it brings. Google returns some of that revenue to Apple.