Siri, the others and Europeans

Siri is back, it works, and it’s real

Two years ago, Apple showed a compelling vision of an LLM-powered personal assistant living on your phone, backed by private compute in the cloud, that had all of your personal context, your calendar, your messaging, your web history, and everything else, and could help you with it in all sorts of practical day to day ways. Unfortunately, that was vapourware. Apple didn’t have it working.

Since then, the team has been replaced, earlier this year Apple did a partnership with Google to build a new set of models, and on Monday, we saw the result. Apple now has a real AI assistant, that probably isn’t cutting edge, and certainly can’t build you a whole website or refactor your code base, but is capable of a wide set of real consumer AI use cases, powered by personal data that overlaps partially with what Google and Meta have, but that OpenAI and Anthropic really don’t have at all. Most importantly, it’s pretty clear that this is now real: the demos were live, the beta is available, though with a waitlist, and people outside Apple who have got access, report that, yes, it is exactly what Apple showed. So, they’re back in the game.

Apple is two years late and not at the cutting edge, but most consumers who already use AI are weekly or monthly actives, not daily: usage is shallow, Apple’s product seems to be good enough, has your personal context, and it’s the default. When the producer is a commodity, distribution wins – Apple embeds on device, Google embeds on the device and in search, Meta puts Meta AI everywhere on its surfaces… and OpenAI has no consumer distribution. We don’t know what the next model will unlock or what the next consumer paradigm is, but ChatGPT might be Netscape, as many people already suggested last year. PRODUCT, MODELS

Siri versus the EU

Apple said that it will not be providing the new AI features in the EU because of the DMA’s competition requirements.

The DMA would require Apple to give any third party assistant the same system access that Siri has. However, the consumer promise of the iPhones, unlike a Mac or PC, is that it’s a managed system where you can’t break your computer and where developers are not free do whatever they want to your data, for better or for worse. So, Apple says that it went to the EU and said “we can build an intermediate brokerage and security layer, so that third party assistants could do what Siri will do, but that would be 18 months of work, so you’re going to need to tell us if you would approve it before we do that work” – and Apple’s story is that the EU said, “We’re not going to tell you. Build it and then we’ll make a decision”.

Sadly, this is a story I’ve heard from people at many large tech companies. The DMA and the DSA have very wide scope for interpretation and it’s a matter of opinion whether X or Y product implementation would follow the law, so the tech company goes to the EU and says “will you agree that this follows the law?” and the EU says “we’re not going to tell you – ship it, and then we’ll decide, and if you guess wrong we’ll fine you”. It’s very hard to see this as a good faith attempt at regulating a complex and fast-moving sector.

Meanwhile, this means people in the EU can’t access the cutting edge of AI models from Anthropic, and quite possibly from other U.S. labs as well, because of U.S. government decisions, and in parallel, they can’t access a practical day-to-day AI assistant integrated into their daily lives, because of decisions made by the EU. LINK