2026-06-12 20:53:23
There are a number of narratives the past few weeks that I think you can tie together with the same string. That is, we may be slowly shifting into a world where frontier AI isn't needed for most workflows. I mean, technically that has always been the case. But we're starting to see real action and movement around that notion to turn it into a reality for many.
First came the narrative around costs spiraling out of control at many companies trying to leverage AI in day-to-day operations. Some of this is obviously related to the "tokenmaxxing" trend, but it's also seemingly just around "normal" AI deployment too. With usage growing and the shift towards consumption-based pricing...
Then came the news of NVIDIA 'RTX Spark' systems. The company's shift into CPUs for PCs is all about local inference. Why? At least in part to be able to cut AI costs and workloads in the clouds, while also potentially boosting speed if you simply don't need the biggest and best models for everything.
Next we saw Apple at WWDC showcase 'Siri AI' – for real this time – which is heavily predicated around their on-device models. While much was made about the Google Gemini partnership, and rightfully so, the real key may be their routing system which is able to quickly know when to use those local models versus when to call to their models running in the cloud – Google's Cloud, running NVIDIA chips, no less. For a lot of Siri queries, you won't need that. And for a lot of your personal content, you may not want that. And if you do need it, Apple may charge you more for it.
Speaking of, this week also brought Claude Fable 5 – yes, Anthropic's 'Mythos' model meant for the masses, at last. Beyond the security concerns, there are major cost concerns too. To the point where Anthropic has a big disclaimer on the model picker that customers will have access to Fable through June 22, at which point it's likely to be an extra-cost add-on. Read: credits will be burned. And the reality here is that Fable is undoubtedly overkill for many "regular" AI workflows.
And that's my word to tie all of these things together: it feels like we're entering the Era of AI Overkill.
Famous last words and all that, but while everyone has spent the past couple of years debating if and when frontier model development would slow down, the real story may be reaching a sort of equilibrium where end-users (and businesses) are realizing that they simply don't need the latest and greatest model for every task. And certainly, given the rising costs with rising usage, they may not want to pay for the best every time.
Again, on paper, this isn't anything new. It's the reason why we've long had the model picker drop-downs within the various AI products. They always implied that maybe you don't need the biggest and best model for your task – and, in fact, this other model may be far faster. But money has a way of talking that time doesn't. If you're telling someone that using this other model will be not just faster, but far cheaper, they're more likely to listen. Provided the end result is still good. And again, for many queries/tasks, "good enough" is now just that.
Countering this is the ongoing push towards agentic workflows and yes, coding. But as Apple may more clear this week, that's probably not going to be the AI workflows that the masses use any time soon. Over time, sure, agents will continue to creep into our lives. But for a lot of tasks, the on-device agentic work that Apple is offering will be more than enough to surprise and delight the masses.
The power users like you and me will undoubtedly continue to use – and pay for – the Claudes and the ChatGPTs at the bleeding edge. But again, it's impossible to argue with free.
What will be truly interesting will be watching how enterprises strike this balance. In light of the rising AI bills, do they start to buy up RTX Spark machines to take a lot of AI work offline as it were? "Unmetered intelligence" is a term that Microsoft and others would really like to make happen. Spending a few thousand dollars up-front versus tens or hundreds of thousands per employee over time is obviously a pretty easy equation. Again, provided the output is still good!
Do we enter a world of 'have and have-nots' in business where the biggest businesses pay up for the frontier AI all the time while smaller businesses "settle" for cheaper AI?
Hybridization seems inevitable here as well. And that will require good routing systems to know what should be done locally, for free, versus what needs to be handled at the frontier in the cloud. The buzzword you're actually looking for here is "orchestration", again, not new. But it will be increasingly important. Not just to route between different models from different providers, and different models from the same provider, but also local versus cloud models.
How the model makers themselves handle this will also be interesting to watch. Obviously they've been trying to take on more of the work of picking the right model for you, but this has also prompted some backlash and backtracking. At the same time, it was never going to be tenable to have a Microsoft Office-like toolbar system of drop-downs, and instead, most people will want what Apple is now offering with Siri AI: one prompt box to rule them all.
Yes, yes, here too power users will want to decide and pick their own. But also undoubtedly not always. It's just far too big of a cognitive burden to have to think about which model you want to use for each query or task. And as workflows move more towards audio and perhaps to different types of AI devices, the UI to handle such model picking quickly goes away out of necessity.
And as agentic workflows become more automated, the system will necessarily need to pick the right models for your task. Interestingly, while much of this work started local with OpenClaw and the like, this will probably increasingly move the other way: to the cloud as more devices get incorporated into such workflows. But there still might be a home "hub" for local model work to save cost/time? Even if it's a smartphone?
Again, if nothing else, people may feel more comfortable running their personal information locally. Certainly Apple believes this! And going forward, does our personal AI morph into our professional AI, or do they stay fully separate?
Anyway, yes, it's fun to try Fable to see if it can answer "who let the dogs out?", but it's also increasingly insanely expensive and stupid to do that. I mean, it was always stupid to do that. But now money talks. And barks back.
As we enter the Era of AI Overkill, are the cheaper and local models ready to answer the call? And is the orchestration layer ready to route to them?
2026-06-12 02:10:11
I'm not sure it's entirely fair, but it's right there: if the new leadership of Xbox just wrapped up their 'Charm Offensive', the next phase looks to be the 'Harm Offensive'.
While Asha Sharma and team spent their first 100 days rejuvenating the XBOX brand, killing off AI, dropping subscription prices, restoring exclusives, bringing on talent, retro green translucent anniversary consoles, an Oprah moment! Yeah, these next 100 are going to be significantly tougher. Including, it seems, mass layoffs...
It's harsh, but I also think it's a sound strategy. You want to give consumers hope that you've heard what the problems are and to showcase that you intend to change them, instantly in some cases. At the same time, there are very real structural and business problems in the division, which is going to require some drastic actions to help course-correct. If you launch those first, it's just going to fuel the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the entire endeavor. So you start with the carrots before switching to sticks...
During said charm offensive, I noted that Sharma's fast, big moves reminded me of the early days of her boss, Satya Nadella, when he took over the larger Microsoft org a dozen years ago. One of his very first moves was to announce Office for iPad. Obviously, it had been in the works for some time – hence it being ready to be shown off – but the key was the symbolism of the move. It signaled a new day and era for Microsoft. After Steve Ballmer's "lost decade" of mostly milking profits from Windows, the company was ready to change and reorient itself to move forward.
Sharma's moves were arguably more dramatic, because she was rapidly retconning a lot of what Phil Spencer and team had spent the past several years putting in place. Of course, that's also fairly easy to do when none of that stuff was working. And Sharma's 'Next 100 Days' memo outlines just how dire things are:
We will end this fiscal year at about a 3% accountability margin, down year-over-year. Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.
Yes, that's aside from the nearly $70B spent on Activision Blizzard. And that's important to note because that deal was masking the growing disaster within Xbox. The core was no longer working, Microsoft was buying revenue to mask it. Sharma ripped the mask off. "Going forward, this cannot continue."
Earlier this week, she was noting that her job, first and foremost, was to build Xbox back into a leading entertainment company. Just last week, she was specifically noting that her job wasn't about the margins – something which Nadella and Microsoft CFO Amy Hood were clearly pushing the division on previously. But as this memo showcases, it is also still about the margins. Xbox isn't a charity, it needs to be sustainable, as Nadella has made clear.
Part of that, unfortunately, means layoffs. And part of it means backtracking from the weird, piecemeal strategy put in place by Sharma's predecessors. 'Xbox Everywhere' doesn't make sense if Xbox is nowhere. And while I think it's fine to do some level of cross-promotion and pollination of older games and/or IP to other platforms, the goal obviously has to be to bring more people back to Xbox, not to make it so that no one needs to buy an Xbox.
As such, exclusives are back on the menu. Which also means ripping off some band-aids with your would-be awkward partners like Sony. Sorry, we're no longer going to be feeding you so that you can kill us even faster.
In a way, I'm reminded a bit of another famous tech CEO coming in: Steve Jobs. When Jobs came back to Apple in early 1997, the company was obviously in bad shape. Infamously close to death. One of the first orders of business was massive layoffs – executed by then-CEO Gil Amelio, before he himself was executed and Jobs was officially elevated into his famous 'iCEO' role.
Jobs too had a sea-change moment like Nadella, albeit in reverse, by striking a deal with Microsoft to ensure that Office would continue to be supported on the Mac. Everyone remembers the equity investment, but this was the key to that deal. Well, and Bill Gates showing up on screen behind Jobs during his keynote at Macworld in Boston. While the "Big Brother" vibes are humorous today, this moment also signaled a new era at Apple and a path forward, "for Apple to win, Microsoft doesn't have to lose". 17 years later, Nadella had the same message in reverse.
Sorry, I've gotten a bit lost in the nostalgia here. My point is that after these moves, Jobs also acted fast to cut the product lines – perhaps most notably, killing off the Mac clones. One can't help but see parallels here between Xbox putting their titles on other systems and the Mac clones. On paper, it sounds like expanding the addressable market and getting paid to do so. In practice, it nearly destroyed the soul of Apple and perhaps was doing the same to Xbox.
Yes, I just compared Sharma's early efforts at Xbox to the magic of both Satya Nadella and Steve Jobs. That's unfair – to them and to her. It's early – just 100 days! – we'll see where this goes. But certainly her first moves have been impressive and have completely transformed the vibes around the brand in short order.1 But now comes the hard part. The layoffs and getting the business actually in order.
While the strategy sucked, Xbox also got blindsided by component prices – of course, fueled in part by Microsoft's own role in the AI arms race... That perhaps puts 'Project Helix' – the next Xbox – in jeopardy, or maybe just makes it more likely that they rely more on third party manufacturers for the hardware. Uh oh, that sounds a lot like Xbox Clones... What's the plan for Game Pass? Mysterious new business models? How long until they spin out Activision Blizzard?
Speaking of disastrous massive acquisitions... While Ballmer handed Nadella a range of issues – cough, Nokia, cough – Microsoft's underlying business remained in great shape. Xbox's business is perhaps more like Apple's back when Steve Jobs came back: on the brink. The big difference, of course, is that Xbox is under Microsoft. So it's sort of a hybrid of those two situations. Xbox is not going to die tomorrow, but they still need to figure out the correct path forward to be viable.
A bunch of good will has seemingly been restored, fast. A smart move ahead of some major, but necessary hard calls. Hang on...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Especially when you consider that she was thought to be the assassin sent by Microsoft to terminate Xbox. Perhaps death by AI, was the general feared given her previous role. Good on her for quickly changing that narrative. ↩
2026-06-11 00:56:01
The trailer just hit so the take is especially hot, but I'm fairly concerned about where The Social Reckoning – the sequel/"companion" to The Social Network – is going to go. I'm worried no one was around to check some of Aaron Sorkin's worst instincts that often surface in some of his more charged work. And this seems to be especially charged. I'm mildly surprised he didn't title this "Fuck Facebook".
Truly great voice work out of Jeremy Strong though. Will it be enough to make us forget Jesse Eisenberg? And a nice call-back to the original's soundtrack in the title card – ruined by "she's disrupting". Some interesting wardrobe choices too... Aside: where's the trailer for Artificial – aka the OpenAI movie, which wrapped filming months ago?!
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
☁️ Apple's Models in Google's Cloud on NVIDIA's Chips – The biggest surprise out of WWDC may have been the acknowledgement by Apple that they're not only using Google Cloud to run their larger models (i.e. those that can't fit on device), but that they're doing so on NVIDIA chips (which had been rumored, but no one expected Apple to confirm directly). This is sort of wild both because Apple and NVIDIA have a contentious history going back years. Something which may or may not have played a role in Apple not getting into the AI arms races to begin with... But also because given the Google partnership already in place, why not just use TPUs? Especially since Apple went out of their way to train their models on TPUs – again, bypassing NVIDIA GPUs – in the past. This new set up is clearly about inference, but still, Google has TPUs built just for that! The answer seems to be in a feature called 'Nvidia Confidential Computing' and "ambiguous confidential compute" which Apple specifically called out in their Q&A after the keynote. Clearly, this was the way Apple felt most comfortable extending their Private Cloud Compute initiative (and branding) beyond their own servers. And it's a nice way to diversify a bit from the pure Google reliance, I suppose. Still, you can bet Apple would prefer to do this all on their own servers with their own chips. Perhaps someday... For now, another Big Tech AI Infinity Stone for Jensen. [CNBC]
🇪🇺 No Siri AI for EU – Perhaps the most unintentionally funny moment of the WWDC keynote was when Craig Federighi was trying to keep a straight face while announcing during his walk & talk that sadly, all of the new AI features that Apple had just unveiled would not be coming to the EU at this time. Why? The DMA of course. No one will be surprised that I side firmly with Apple here because it's both ridiculous to think that a government body should pre-regulate product feature development, but also because in this particular matter, the entire world is currently worried about the AI security nightmares starting to happen while acknowledging that they're completely unprepared for what is to come. Meanwhile, the EU would seemingly like to pour gasoline on such concerns. Obviously, that's not their intent but they're also obviously not smart enough – years into the DMA – to recognize what the second-order effects might be of say, allowing any AI provider to have deep and full access to all the content of your iPhone. EU to OpenClaw: hold my lobster. So while EU politicians think they look great as the competition police standing up to Apple, I just see a bunch of smug, naive fire starters. The bloc is constantly complaining that they don't have their own tech companies to rival those from America and Asia and yet they can't quite understand why that might be. Or worse, they do, but they'd rather take some lame political victory laps without realizing that they're running backwards and taking 450M people with them. (China is another matter, of course, which will now fall firmly at the feet of Tim Cook in his new ambassador-in-chief role at Apple.) I'm sure this blurb will inspire those living with acute cases of Stockholm syndrome in Europe to respond conveying their happiness in regulation slavery. May you enjoy the pop-ups forever and ever. [MacRumors]
📽️ 'Scary Movie' Screams, 'Masters of the Universe' Bombs – This latest box office battle seems quite different on the surface than the whole Backrooms/Obsession phenomenon. But actually, it may not be all that different. While by most accounts Masters is actually pretty good and Scary is actually pretty bad, one key driver here may have been demographics once again. That is, a younger group had nostalgia for the Scary Movie franchise, which is about 20 to 25 years old, while the Masters nostalgia is calling back more like 40 years. One cohort showed up, the other didn't. There are other audience variables as well here – horror movies, pure satire, R-rated, anti-woke stuff, black audiences, etc – still, it feels like we're going to see a fast shift to cater to those younger demographics since the olds seem to being staying home. Personally, I'm right in the Masters demo – it was my favorite toy and cartoon when I was a kid – as I've somewhat embarrassingly written about a number of times! So I rushed out to see the movie, right? Well, no. I want to, but well, now I have kids! And I suspect a lot of the Masters demo is in that boat too – it's just a lot of time and effort (and money) to coordinate going to a movie that solely for my enjoyment. (The flipside: I suspect streaming will salvage this one as well for Amazon.) That said, I did take my oldest to go see The Mandalorian and Grogu, but in week three of release for similar reasons. We liked it! But not something we needed to rush out to see... [NYT]
M.G. Siegler
"It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."
– OpenAI's official statement given to The New York Times alongside the news that they had confidentially filed for an IPO. Normally, such events are a cause for celebration, but this must be the most timid such announcement of all time.
It obviously suggests that the company doesn't actually intend to go public any time soon and clearly would prefer not to. But they've been sort of backed into a corner by their main rival, Anthropic, filing. And if the IPO of another rival, xAI (by way of SpaceX) founded by one of their co-founders (who just got done suing them), goes well, it might be the most prudent thing to tap the market now before any such window comes crashing closed.
At the same time, the best thing for OpenAI to do may be to wait a bit, to distance themselves from Anthropic which will clearly be going out with better metrics, certainly on the business-front. And perhaps to give them time to morph the products and get the ads business working and built out. It's a very complicated tension, obviously.
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• OpenAI's 'Third Phase'
• A Stargate Reborn in Ohio
2026-06-10 23:36:58
In the midst of Big Tech conference season, Alex Kantrowitz and I used our monthly discussion on his Big Technology Podcast to mainly go over Google I/O and preview WWDC.
Basically, it felt like I/O underwhelmed because it centered around a lot of stuff that wasn't ready to roll – namely, their new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro. But there wasn't a risk this would be like Apple two years ago at WWDC with vaporware galore, it was more just strange to have a big event with many of your announcements not yet ready. Perhaps it's time to re-think such events in the Age of AI as the cadence of releases is just different, clearly.
Alex is worried that Google is once again falling behind in AI, and Sundar Pichai sort of admitted as much at least when it comes to the all-important coding capabilities at the moment. This matters because it could be the key to powerful agents and perhaps even AGI eventually thanks to recursive self-improvement. I mean, Google doesn't even have a "Super App" yet. What are they doing?
The answer seems to be working on "Omni Models" – read: "World Models". But those too aren't quite ready to roll, so... Instead, we got a lot of updates to Google Search, which are interesting, but there's a real concern that Google won't be able to fully push into uncharted AI territory because of their myriad legacy products. Is the PM on Gmail going to let their product die in favor of Gemini simply doing email on your behalf? No. While Google has done an incredible job righting there ship after the Bard stumbles out of the AI gate, Big Company issues will always persist on some level...
Meanwhile, with WWDC also now in the rearview, our preview and discussion seems to hold up well. I noted we weren't likely to see any hardware and that a lot of people would view the event as underwhelming because it would basically be a do-over – or mulligan – of the WWDC AI promises from two years ago.
I was curious how they would play up (or not) the new Google partnership, and to the surprise of many, it did get a nice, juicy mention during the keynote. As did Visual Intelligence, which may be the key to Apple's AI future on the iPhone and beyond. For now though, it will be more about voice, which again, the keynote made clear.
Alex is very interested in the iPhone Fold/Ultra and while I didn't think there was any chance they'd show that off early – which they didn't, the first betas of iOS 27 do actually give some major hints about it in the code. But we'll have to wait until early September for John Ternus' first keynote to actually see and hear about the device and it's perhaps funky new form-factor.
Maybe the most wild part of the entire show is that Ternus wasn't a part of it, at all! Instead, Tim Cook signed off one final time with a nice message. So if Ternus is going to pull a Satya Nadella and do something big to signal the start of his era – like, say, changing the App Store fees? – that will have to wait until the Fall as well.
For the last segment, we talked a bit about Meta's messy new premium tiers for their social networks and what the strategy is here (hint: operation diversify from their ads business, which is 98% of Meta's revenues, as we move towards the AI future). Will they actually roll out some sort of cloud offering as Mark Zuckerberg has suggested, or was that simply to throw Wall Street a bone amidst all the continued CapEx? I mean, if SpaceX is now a "neocloud"...
But wait, there was one more thing for us as well. While we were recording, news broke that Anthropic had filed confidentially to go public. This was a legitimate surprise since the word has already leaked out that OpenAI was about to file, but their rival beat them to the punch! And that's potentially a big problem for OpenAI as it makes for a very tricky narrative on their own would-be roadshow. They're now behind in both top-line and bottom-line numbers versus Anthropic, and Google has pulled even in terms of Gemini monthly active users.
Maybe the SpaceX listing goes so well that it raises all AI boats, as it were.1 But we're a long way from when Anthropic and/or OpenAI would list. A lot can happen between now and then. We'll see!
1 While we did talk about inclusion in the indicies almost immediately boosting these stocks, I did note that "maybe not the S&P 500" – and sure enough, they later rejected the notion of fast-tracking companies for inclusion (which is a good call). ↩
2026-06-09 21:25:20
From a pure AI perspective, nothing Apple showcased during their WWDC keynote yesterday was particularly groundbreaking. In fact, much of it featured capabilities long since available in other AI tools and services – in some cases, years ago. And guess what? That doesn't matter. Based on what we saw yesterday, Apple is set to win in AI. At least from a consumer perspective.
I know how crazy this sounds. It's not just that Apple has been viewed as behind in AI for the past few years, it's that they've been more or less a laughingstock given how they tried to roll out 'Apple Intelligence' two years ago and failed to the point of settling lawsuits around false advertising. But if Apple is actually able to roll out what they showcased yesterday – I'll get to the caveats below – and there's reason to believe they can this time, they're about to infuriate many people and companies across a wide swath of industries. That's because Apple seems on the verge of doing what they always do: watching new products and services come about and then jumping in later with a better user experience to win the day.
This annoys people because... they can't just do that! So and so was doing this long ago! FIRST! This is old! BORING! Lame. THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS! We saw it all on display in response to the keynote yesterday. And Wall Street seemed to agree with the angry mobs, sending the stock down in after-hours trading.
I'm here to tell you that none of that matters. Apple Intelligence and the new 'Siri AI' may seem underwhelming to those who live at the bleeding edge of AI. But 99% of people don't live there. And even more actually don't want to live there, but feel the need to in some ways lest they feel like they're being left behind in our Age of AI. If ChatGPT showed AI to the masses, Apple is set to bring usage mainstream.
I understood this immediately when I saw Apple's VP of Siri Engineering, Mike Rockwell – the man tasked with fixing Siri – do his demo during the keynote. It was simple and natural and that was the point. All he was doing was holding down the Side Button (maybe they should rename it to the Siri Button?) and talking to Siri AI. He didn't have to load up Terminal. He didn't have to download some coding app. He didn't have to download any app. Right out of the iPhone box, Siri AI will just work.
Well, provided Siri works, of course.
That's why this demo was key. While it wasn't live – and it would have obviously been more effective were it truly live, on-stage – it was clearly shot in real-time. There were slight delays here and there that weren't edited out. This was obviously intentional on Apple's part, to show you that unlike say, two years ago, this isn't vaporware. This is Siri actually doing things. Things she was previously not capable of doing.
Again, much of it wasn't particularly impressive from a pure AI perspective. But context matters – here, quite literally. This was always the promise of Apple Intelligence, that Apple would be able to pull in all the iPhone knows about you to handle any query and augment that with "world knowledge". Apple was unable to do that two years ago, but now Google is here to save the day. The fact that they got an actual shout-out tells you just how vital they are to this effort. Yes, Apple "distilled" Gemini to make their own, new "Apple Foundation Models", but it's the heavy-lifting that Google did in training these models which is going to make this all sing for Apple this time.
So why not just use Gemini? After all, there's an app for that. Well, you could and many will. But many more will not simply because Siri is baked in at the system level. This gives it capabilities no other AI service can match – at least until regulators try to force Apple to give others such access. But even if and when that happens, years down the line, the power will remain in the default. In not having to download and open an app, but in simply needing to hold down a button or saying "Siri" and everything just working.
Back to Rockwell's demo, the key to me was that the entire thing was done vocally. Certainly part of that is because it makes for a better demo than typing, but it's also likely how a lot of people are going to start using Siri AI. I say that because it's the way I interact with AI much of the time already. Perhaps I'm biased, but I also see the way my children have used Alexa and the like for years. They're growing up learning to use computers in more "natural" ways – not with a mouse and keyboard, but with touch and voice.
Obviously there are going to be times when you don't want to or can't use voice, but I highly suspect it's going to become the go-to way to interact with AI for many use-cases. And that's why we're about to see a rush of new devices hit the market focused on that interaction model. But just as we learned about cameras when the iPhone launched nearly 20 years ago, the best AI device is going to be the one you have on you. And at least for the foreseeable future, that's the iPhone.
That's what these demos were about yesterday. The iPhone is now an AI device. And so is the iPad. And the Mac. And Apple Watch. Even the Vision Pro.
Soon, AirPods. And a few other devices that Apple is clearly cooking up. And yes, Meta and others are already in the market with such devices, but they don't have the iPhone. But they still need the iPhone. And that's a problem. It will be a bigger one once Apple rolls out Siri AI.
Only Google and perhaps Samsung can meet Apple on the battlefield here thanks to their own smartphones. But while Google controls Gemini itself, they're going to have a hard time matching the product experience on every device beyond their own Pixel phones. And those hold a tiny sliver of the market. Google probably should aim to make the Pixel devices bigger to match Apple here – and perhaps their partnership will illuminate that opportunity, not unlike those early days of the iPhone. But that will involve complicated trade-offs with the broader Android ecosystem, including, yes, Samsung.
This is Apple leveraging their fully-integrated approach once again. The surprise is that they're seemingly able to do it without building their own frontier models from scratch. But they've perhaps lucked into a market where competition abounds and so Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all want to compete for their business. They might suggest they didn't want that business now that Google won it, but obviously they do. Who would turn down access to billions of highly engaged, active, and lucrative users?
Down the road, it's inevitable that Apple will have to do more on their own. Again, Google may force this issue once they shift focus as they always inevitably do. And we may be at the point where LLMs matter less than "World Models" at that point. But for right now, Apple did exactly what they need to do in order to "catch up".
Again, that doesn't mean they'll be at full parity with everything that Anthropic, or OpenAI, or even Google can do with their AI at the moment. But for the masses, for Apple's purposes, most of that won't matter. It will only matter if one of those players has a true product and/or consumer use-case breakthrough. And of those players, OpenAI was the best at creating those. But now they're reorienting their business around coding and enterprise use-cases. Because as Anthropic quickly showed everyone, that's where the money is.
But that's not where the money is for Apple. Their money is in selling devices which in turn leads to them selling services. There will be some level of AI upsell here with iCloud+, but it won't be to the same extent as the other AI players. And while never-say-never with ads, you can probably forget about those anytime soon for Apple too. That's in part because a huge part of Apple's pitch here is privacy. To the point where Apple was fine taking shots at their partners during the keynote, noting, for example, that while other web browsers with AI "track your every move" – I wonder who makes the most popular web browser in the world with AI now baked-in... — Apple will not do that.
But the biggest direct shot came early on from Craig Federighi: "Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI. Without regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve." Gee, wonder who he could mean by that... Perhaps Apple's big AI partner from two years ago? The one, it should be noted, currently considering legal action against Apple over the failures and shortcomings of that partnership...
AI's perception issues are also an angle Apple is going to heavily hit upon because Apple has a level of consumer trust that basically no other tech company enjoys. And in an age when the world – and the US in particular – is worried about where AI is about to take us and perhaps displace us, Apple can offer a more credible story of simply leveraging the technology as a tool for humans to use.
To that end, while everyone is busy chasing down the promise of agents, bulking up their offerings into "super apps" so as to route such work through the desktop, Apple just showed off an agent fully running on a phone. Or an iPad. Or a Mac. All pulled together via their own new app called, wait for it: Siri. Not a super app, in fact, just a super simple app.1 A way to collect and continue your AI workflows across devices. But one that is also not necessary because Siri lives right there, in your Dynamic Island (or Spotlight on the Mac), always ready.
It can see your screen in ways that would require about 15 different levels of permission with Claude. Which is, of course, a good thing to protect users from themselves – something which will undoubtedly be one of the key lessons from the OpenClaw movement. But again, Apple has a level of trust that others can't match. And a device base that others can't touch.
That's going to turn Visual Intelligence into perhaps the most profound shift in all of this. It frankly already should have been the case, but Apple buried it previously. Now it's going to be front-and-center in the most-used app for many people: Camera. It points to a future where wearables don't just augment our reality visually, but they do so with information without the need to pull out your phone. Yes, Meta is already headed there, and others, including Apple, are soon to join, but it seems like we're not quite there yet. For now, it's a great use case for the iPhone camera and a fun demo for the Vision Pro.
All of this adds up to a world in which Apple seizes control of consumer AI. Well, unless you're in the EU – enjoy the regulations! Or in China – enjoy the oversight! But also in those places too, eventually.
Having said all that, it's caveat time. In my preview yesterday, I called back to the famous Steve Jobs "it just works" saying and while watching the keynote, I was quick to append a new variation "if it works" to many of my live-tweets. It's funny, but necessary!
Basically all of the above was also true two years ago when Apple Intelligence was first unveiled. But it ended up only being true on paper, of course. It's possible that the same thing happens this time, but you have to believe there's no way in hell that Apple moves forward with devoting 45 minutes of their 1 hour 15 minute keynote to AI if they're not confident this time.
The bigger issue may be that Siri AI doesn't fail to launch, but just isn't very good upon launch. Here, we can look back upon the past 15 years of Siri. Every year we've been promised that Siri is getting better. And while that may have been true in small ways, relative to the state of the art, first with Alexa and now certainly with the LLMs, Siri has been made to look worse relatively speaking, every year.
Again, I believe Google's involvement is what breaks this cycle. But there are a lot of questions there still. What happens if/when Gemini is constantly updated? Does Apple need to re-distill each time? Do they update their models on their own apart from Google? Do we need a full software update to update the models given how much is apparently going to run locally?! All of this would suggest a company that still may not be quite ready to operate in the Age of AI, where the state of the art changes constantly.
The good news is that increasingly, most day-to-day usage won't require the state of the art. And, in fact, it increasingly may prove too expensive to use the state of the art for most tasks. Again, Apple's timing could be good here. But we won't know that for sure until Siri AI is out in the wild and competing with say, Mythos.
Then again, I'm not sure how much they will actually compete. There will always be the AI power users – of which I'll certainly be one – but most users will not be AI power users. They'll be content to use the default, provided the default is good enough. But that's underselling Apple here since it's really about having a good enough base layer for things like world knowledge mixed with the contextual stuff around your personal data that only they can do. While it sounds simple, this complexity is not easy. It's entirely possible that we see a world where most iPhone users use Siri AI for, say, 80% of their AI needs and then pick another model/service for the other 20%. Or maybe it's even more granular, with two or more other AI services filling in specific niches. Again, we'll see.
But what I see based on what I saw yesterday is a world where Apple takes the AI consumer lead in relatively short order. Millions of people next year walking around talking to Siri AI, asking her all sorts of things and tasking her with all sorts of things. It's a mixture of the power of the default, Apple's own superior product instincts, OpenAI ceding the consumer high ground, Google being stretched in a million different directions beyond consumer (and, of course, helping out Apple here), Microsoft never being good at consumer, Anthropic not caring about consumer, Amazon not having a smartphone (yet?), and Meta not having the iPhone.
After being left for dead in AI, everything is coming up Apple, again. How annoying for some – THEY CAN'T KEEP DOING THIS. AI becomes a new reason to get an iPhone. Forget AI PCs, this is the first true AI device. If it works.
1 Which needs a better icon... ↩
2026-06-08 19:42:28
Golfers will know the term "mulligan". While the origins are murky, it undoubtedly came from someone with that last name taking a bad shot and requesting a "do over". It's not an officially sanctioned rule, of course. But even the best golfers in the world use a mulligan at some point. Now, one of the best companies in the world is about to use one.
Apple.
Later today at WWDC, Apple will unveil the new Siri – for real this time. Two years ago, the company laid out a vision for 'Apple Intelligence', which sounded good on paper and in presentation. A sort of "AI for the rest of us" – products not fully built around AI, but products you already use augmented with AI to make them smarter. While they were suspiciously light on demos, Apple Intelligence would be coming soon, mostly in the Fall with the usual OS updates, Apple promised.
Given the history of Siri up until that point – bad to the point of becoming Larry David punchlines – we had no real reason to believe Apple would get it right this time. But hey, it was the dawn of the Age of AI. And it was Apple. There's no way they would deceive us with vaporware, right? Right?!
What happened next was a shitting of the bed not seen since the Apple Maps debacle in Tim Cook's early days as CEO. And actually this would prove to be far worse. Because at least Apple could make a compelling business (and subsequently, privacy) case for why they needed to rip out Google Maps and roll their own. With AI, Apple was just in over their heads, but they couldn't see it. Worse, they thought everyone else was wrong. That chatbots were a silly toy. That LLMs would be a passing fad. Again, wrong.
Heads rolled, though clearly not as fast as they should have. WWDC 2025 came and went with Apple hoping that new UI would distract from AI. It didn't matter that 'Liquid Glass' was divisive, what mattered was that everyone was talking about it rather than talking about Apple's AI failures. When those were brought up, Apple was ready with some epic gaslighting. "As you know, Apple Intelligence is great..."
Behind the scenes, everything was not great, of course. Beyond making the wrong early calls and bets with AI, the problems were exacerbated by the nature of the technology itself. It was continuing to evolve so fast that even if Apple could ship their answer, it was likely going to be out-of-date by the time it did – we saw this with the few features that did actually launch. They were a day late and about a billion dollars short.
Many more elements just never shipped. And the constant delays even started spilling over into Apple's bread-and-butter: their tangible products which sat somewhere, probably in Asia, ready to be assembled but lacking the smarts needed to make them sing. So those too were delayed.
Apple faced the same problem that Amazon did in that they had a massive install base already using the old version of their "AI" – the Siri and Alexa voice assistants – for rudimentary tasks such as setting timers, checking the weather, and playing music. They perhaps thought they could just swap in the new tech to replace the old tech, but when they tried to do that, things started breaking at the edges.
Even Google was running into such issues, which is why it has taken so long to replace all the functionality of their 'Assistant' with Gemini.
But whereas Amazon and Google were deep in the weeds of AI, Apple was not. So it was a bit like trying to change an engine mid-flight not with a toolkit, but with a tuna fish sandwich.
I had a sense of what Apple probably needed to do about 18 months ago: replace Siri with an AI service that actually worked. Not just as a fallback, a role ChatGPT has obtusely served, but as the main brain of Siri. Sure, easier said than done, but well, it's eventually exactly what Apple would do.
Well, not exactly, as it sounds like Apple is technically "distilling" Google's Gemini models into a modified version for their own purposes. Still, this is obviously what Apple should have done from the get-go. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it's also the playbook Apple often follows – with Google Maps, for example!
Outsource that shit until your version is ready to roll!
There was undoubtedly a mixture of arrogance and simply bad decisions at play here. But I also worry this aforementioned Age of AI requires a method of execution that Apple is simply not geared towards. Constant, rapid iteration and deployment. Not going under the shroud of secrecy for a year, emerging with a perfectly polished gem to showcase to the world. I think even Google is making this mistake to some extent as the most recent Google I/O showcased.
The difference is that Google, thanks to DeepMind, is an AI powerhouse. Apple probably should have acquired their own DeepMind, but now it's undoubtedly too late and certainly too expensive. So instead they're paying Google to use their DeepMind. Awkward. But the correct call.
And it's why I'm actually optimistic heading into this WWDC keynote. Again, I've remained skeptical of Apple's abilities to pull off AI over the past couple of years because I've been writing about Siri since before they launched it 15 years ago. Every year they say it's going to be the year that Siri gets good. And every year Siri continues to suck.
That's obviously a bit unfair. (But not fully!) Siri has been useful for certain things, like the aforementioned setting of timers and other such rudimentary tasks. But whereas Alexa quickly ate Siri's lunch as a toddler, now ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all the rest are full-on bullying Siri, Mean Girls-style, as a teenager. Can Siri join the cool kids table while also staying true to her roots?
Meaning, of course, Apple's roots in privacy and user experience.
Thanks to the Gemini-infused lobotomy, I'm cautiously optimistic. I also think Apple finds itself in an interesting place thanks to the fact that the product which has long been viewed as the leader in AI, ChatGPT, is in the process of morphing. Because OpenAI is under assault from Google above and Anthropic below, they're pulling back from a pure consumer-focus and going after the lower hanging fruit from a business perspective in the form of developers and enterprises. This might leave an opening for a great new consumer AI product, or suite of products. And who does consumer better than Apple?
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. First and foremost, we just need a Siri that actually works. And then I think we need proof that Apple has actually shifted their mindset under Craig Federighi (and Mike Rockwell – and soon, John Ternus at the very top) to transform the company into one that can actually operate in this Age of AI. I don't think that requires spending hundreds of billions in CapEx every year, but it probably requires spending more than the same $7B to $12B they have every year for the past decade.
Ultimately, the jury is still very much out if they need to own and operate their own frontier foundation models. Certainly they need some of their own models, and they've obviously been working on those. But how much does the frontier matter going forward? Microsoft used to say it didn't, which is why they were happy to let OpenAI own that space. Of course, they also technically had to let them own that space. Now that they no longer do, Microsoft is singing a very different tune...
If Apple can walk the fine line of distilling Gemini for their high-end needs while using their own models for the lower-end AI needs, there's perhaps a path there. But that was also basically the promise two years ago. And, well...
The real risk here is the same as it was with Google Maps all those years ago. That Google alters the terms of their agreement in ways that makes Apple uncomfortable. Apple can either pray they don't alter them further or...
At that point, the answer probably won't be to train their own massive LLM. For one, that probably won't be feasible, but for another, the world may have moved past LLMs at that point – or at least those being the only types of models. Maybe Apple will just skip LLMs (again, the frontier variety) and go right to "World Models"? You could certainly make the case that they're uniquely positioned there given the billions of devices they have out there in the wild ready to gather data.
Then the question becomes if Apple is okay using such data to train such models? Perhaps if they frame it in a "secure" and "private" way, as is the Apple way? But again, can that mentality actually cut it in the Age of AI?
Apple may find themselves backed into a corner at the moment, but the dominance of their devices – the iPhone in particular – also still gives them a unique opportunity. Yes, even now. Yes, even after all the soiled bed sheets. If AI compute moves more towards the edge, Apple may suddenly have a silicon advantage. Even if it doesn't, there's still no better hardware on which to use AI – at least not yet.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and that's the hybrid approach Apple also promised two years ago. If they can actually execute on it...
Step one starts today. Or rather, step two that's a do-over of step one. A mulligan.
One more thing: the other past Apple debacle that keeps popping into my head was MobileMe. In the age before iCloud made it so that Apple's services "just work", Steve Jobs had to lay down the law. As Adam Lashinsky relayed in Fortune:
"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down."
"So why the fuck doesn't it do that?" is a pretty good encapsulation of Siri over these past 15 years. So far, there's been no good answer...
Update June 9, 2026: Some thoughts post-WWDC keynote...
M.G. Siegler
