That's the Internet Explorer of chatbots.

On iPhone, Settings → iCloud → Storage → Siri → Disable and Delete

Edit: Tried it. It works for me. Takes a minute though.

To be clear, I'd much rather have my personal cloud data private than have good AI integration on my devices. But strictly from an AI-centric perspective, Apple painted themselves into a corner.

Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refining the design. When you're churning out a dozen designs a year, can you optimize the fan as well for each one? You hit a certain point where you say "eh, good enough." Apple's aluminum unibody MacBook Pro was largely the same design 2008-2021. They certainly iterated on it, but it wasn't "look at my flashy new case" every year. PC laptop makers come out with new designs with new materials so frequently.

With iPhones, Apple often keeps a design for 3 years. It looks like Samsung has churned out over 25 phone models over the past year while Apple has 5 (iPhone, iPhone Plus, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, iPhone 16e).

It's easy to look so good at things when you do fewer things. I think this is one of Apple's great strengths - knowing where to concentrate its effort.

Their image classification happens on-device, in comparison Google Photos does that server side so they already have ML infra.

They aren't.

"liquid ass" is how most of my friends describe it

Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl...

So I'm guessing in a future update it will be Gemini instead. I hope it's going to be more of an option to choose between the 2.

Wasn't Apple sitting on a pile of cash and having no good ideas what to spend it on?

Don't they have the highest market cap of any company in existence?

This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple, thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS space!

The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1].

AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2].

If a non-profit and a chip vendor (training for marketing purposes) can do this, it clearly doesn't require "burning 10 years of cash flow" or a Google-scale TPU farm.

[0]: https://allenai.org/blog/molmo2

[1]: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3

[2]: https://huggingface.co/amd/AMD-OLMo

Setting aside the obligatory HN dig at the end, LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of the intelligence system Apple is building. The hidden-in-plain-sight thing Apple is doing is exposing all app data as context and all app capabilities as skills.

Anyone with an understanding of Apple's rabid aversion to being bound by a single supplier understands that they've tested this integration with all foundation models, that they can swap Google out for another vendor's solution at any time, and that they have a long-term plan to eliminate this dependency as well.

> Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own.

I'd be interested in a citation for this (Apple introduced two multilingual, multimodal foundation language models in 2025), but in any case anything you hear from Apple publicly is what they want you to think for the next few quarters, vs. an indicator of what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are.

The moat is talent, culture, and compute. Apple doesn't have any of these 3 for SOTA AI.

Anthropic doesn't have a single data centre, they rent from AWS/Microsoft/Google.

> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...

If you re-watch the original iPhone announcement there’s a funny moment where Steve hypes up Google products for a few minutes and brings Schmidt on stage to promote their apps.

Jobs gave that somewhat ominous sounding summary/threat of the hundreds of “inventions” (patents) that went into the iPhone. Which placed a target on Google and Samsung as primary offenders when they (unsurprisingly) decided to compete in the same space.

Of course they still worked together and each made a lot of money off their search deal so even Steve wouldn’t let hurt feelings get in the way of making profitable strategic moves.

> The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.

For many years, siri requests were sent to an external server. It still sucked.

I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).

Even "Play the album XY" leads to Siri only playing the single song. It's hilariously bad.

The biggest thing Apple has to do is get a generic pipeline up and running, that can support both cloud and non-cloud models down the road, and integrate with a bunch of local tools for agent-style workloads (e.g. "restart", "audio volume", "take screenshot" as tools that agents via different cloud/local models can call on-device).