The AI race shows no signs of slowing down. We’ve reported about how iOS 18 is expected to build in many different AI features throughout the OS, and Apple is racing ahead with its AI research and development, publishing new research papers and code several times a month.
But all that internal development doesn’t mean the company won’t also the approach of Microsoft, whose Copilot features in Windows are built with licensed OpenAI technology. If the latest report from Bloomberg is true, iOS 18 may have one or more AI features powered by Google’s new Gemini AI.
Mark Gurman cites “people familiar with the situation” in claiming that Apple is in talks with Google to license Gemini to power “some new features coming to the iPhone software this year.” Gemini is Google’s latest next-generation generative AI model just introduced in December (with Gemini 1.5 announced in February). Apple is said to have also spoken with OpenAI recently as well.
Google has paid Apple billions of dollars a year to make its search engine the default for the iPhone’s Safari web browser. Users can change this, but most don’t know how or care to. As a result, over a billion iPhone users make multiple Google searches a day, helping to cement Google’s dominance in search and of course making the company a ton of money serving ads.
It’s unclear how this new deal would compare to that one. The report says that issues like branding or the scope of how features would be implemented have not yet been decided.
Gemini made a big splash when it arrived earlier this year, but quickly ran into controversy. After a series of social-media posts showing inaccurate depictions of historical figures, Google “paused” image generation and admitted that its “tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.”
Apple is pushing hard to introduce lots of big new AI-driven features in iOS 18 and has been publishing research papers on AI at an increasing rate over the last several months. A deal to use Google’s generative AI may be an indication that Apple isn’t far enough along in producing some of its own AI tools, or the effort may be limited in scope—using Gemini for browser-based features like AI-powered search or web page summaries, for example, while Apple’s own AI is used for other features like image editing and an upgraded Siri.
We likely won’t hear anything concrete about Apple’s AI partners and homegrown tools until WWDC in June, when the company takes the wraps off iOS 18, macOS 15, and its other new operating systems.
