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A report suggests Apple is in talks with Google to build its AI model into iPhones.

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• Apple is a company defined by perfectionism and AI is anything but perfect right now.
• That may help explain why it’s exploring a licensing agreement with Google.
• The two tech giants are discussing a “blockbuster” licensing agreement to bring Gemini to iPhones.

Apple isn’t quite ready to handle the messy reality of AI by itself, apparently.

The iPhone maker has been in talks with Google over a “blockbuster” licensing agreement that would see it build the search giant’s Gemini AI model into its phones, with a release being prepared for iOS 18, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

For Tim Cook, who told investors last month that Apple would be ready to share details of its artificial intelligence work later this year, the move would make a lot of sense. Apple is a company that prides itself on being a perfectionist, but AI is anything but perfect right now.

Why handle the mess of AI by itself when it can pass it on to someone else?

AI is a messy business

If there’s one thing the AI boom has shown since the launch of ChatGPT, it’s that the technology is really, really messy — something Apple’s rumored partner knows all too well.

Google was forced to apologize last month after the AI image-generation feature of its Gemini model suffered several mishaps that saw it produce “historically inaccurate” results, for instance. The issues were so bad that people accused the model of being “woke.”

More broadly, large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT have been heavily criticized over the issues they have with hallucinations, as well as the risks they have of perpetuating dangerous stereotypes and biases carried in the data they’ve been trained on.

How Apple would deal with its own version of a technology that makes so many serious and frequent blunders is unclear. Perfectionism has been hardwired into its DNA thanks to Steve Jobs, so anything that disrupts that would be a huge deal.

Apple does, of course, want an AI strategy, despite all the mess the technology brings with it.

Fresh AI features could help Apple boost falling iPhone sales in China.

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The company is grappling with falling iPhone sales in China — where it generated roughly 20% of its revenue last year — in the face of stiffer competition from local smartphone makers. Fresh generative AI features could give iPhones the extra edge they need to boost sales again.

However, having a partner to do the “heavy lifting of generative AI” — a role Bloomberg reported Google could play by working with Apple — could avoid taking primary responsibility for any embarrassments triggered by AI.

Cook could still give consumers AI with more of an Apple flavor at a later date.

Last week, the tech giant submitted a paper to the open-access repository ArXiv that shared several details about MM1, a family of multimodal LLMs — AI models that process text and images to generate responses — that Apple has quietly been working on.

There’s a lot packed into the 41-page submission, like the fact Apple trained these models on data generated by OpenAI’s GPT-4 vision model, as well as its view on how to design better AI models (size isn’t everything; things like “image resolution” matter a bunch too is its take.)

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives expects Apple to share “several new AI features based on its own, homegrown LLM models” when its Worldwide Developers Conference takes place in June.

The company has also been actively buying up AI startups in a sign that it is looking to deepen its in-house talent and expertise, led by senior vice president John Giannandrea. However, there are no clear signs of what Apple plans to do with those purchases.

What does seem increasingly clear, though, is that Apple knows it must make a big play on AI. It would just be a whole lot easier for it to leave the messier bits of it to someone else.