From Artificiality This Week * Our Gathering: Our Artificiality Summit 2025 will be held on October 23-25 in Bend, Oregon. The
AI agents are evolving with orchestration layers enabling modular, autonomous systems beyond traditional SaaS, reshaping workflows, labor, and software design.
David Wolpert warns AI networks may evolve beyond human math, creating unpredictable, emergent intelligence that defies control and comprehension.
Apple + Google is possibly the most important corporate frenemy relationship today. How these two companies establish their positions in generative AI is critical to watch. But how they re-position their partnership to include generative AI might be one of the most important events of the year.
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Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is in talks with Google to license Gemini, Google’s most recent generative AI model, for the iPhone. Given the secrecy of such talks, it’s difficult to predict the nature of the license. But reading the rumor triggered a reflection on three of our obsessions:
AI Inside. 2024 is already the year of generative AI moving inside current applications and workflows. From Microsoft Office to Adobe Creative Suite, software vendors are embedding proprietary, licensed, or open-source AI models. Google has pushed generative AI into Google Workspace and has previewed how AI will integrate with search and Chrome.
We don’t yet have any insight into how Apple is thinking about generative AI in Safari. Are they considering adding a conversational interface? If so, are they thinking of that conversation as an extension of Siri or as an extension of Google Search? If it’s the former, it makes most sense that Apple would rely on its own LLM. But, if it’s the latter, discussing a license for Gemini makes a lot of sense.
AI at the Edge. Both Apple and Google are pursuing hardware and software strategies to move generative AI inferences (aka processing prompts & responses) to edge devices. Apple has released developer tools to assist in accelerating foundation models for its A and M chips. And Google has released a mobile-oriented version of Gemini, called Nano, that is specifically targeted at its own mobile chips. Moving AI from centralized data centers to edge devices provides significant advantages in cost (there is no compute cost to use your phone) and privacy/security (your data doesn’t need to leave your phone to be used).
Might licensing discussions involve Google accelerating Gemini Nano for Apple’s Neural Engine? If so, it is possible that developers would have the ability to write applications that use Gemini Nano on all iOS and Android devices. This could represent a big advantage over having to write different applications for different models on each mobile OS. This could also provide a competitive win for Google versus its foundation model competitors, since developers might choose a model other than Gemini if that model was available on both Android and iOS.
Generative AI changes everything about the customer experience. We think that generative AI will change the boundary of every customer experience journey. Our conversations with generative AI searches have the potential to stretch from consideration to action to reflection for everything we do.
In a recent workshop with the board and executive team of a large e-commerce company, we showed how their current portion of the customer journey may be bookended by generative AI interactions. The customer starts by exploring options through generative search, then communicates to other people through AI-enabled messaging, email, and docs. Whether the customer ends up on this company’s site is no longer a question of brand and SEO, but a question of how the conversational search system handles the customer need and desire—might Google just solve the customer need itself? Both Apple and Google have the potential to understand a customer journey far better than any other company, given all the interactions these companies touch.
How does that change the competitive positioning of every other company? We think: quite a lot.
Apple + Google is possibly the most important corporate frenemy relationship today. Their partnerships are win-wins, and their competitions are essential to deflecting accusations of monopolies (see our separate article on Apple’s recent antitrust issues). How these two companies establish their positions in generative AI is critical to watch. But how they re-position their partnership to include generative AI might be one of the most important events of the year.
By enabling different AI models to 'speak' to each other and combine their strengths, CALM opens up new possibilities for solving complex problems across various domains and tackling tasks with expertise and precision, in a data and compute efficient way.
AI could help humans appreciate the diverse perceptual worlds of animals by simulating their senses and thought processes.
I agree with the government that antitrust is important. That said, I would hate to see data privacy and security diminished just as we are trying to take advantage of AI’s power to be a personalized digital partner.
An update on our research obsession with trust and AI.
The Artificiality Weekend Briefing: About AI, Not Written by AI
