A ‘GeminiPhone’ could boost Apple’s and Google’s AI game
There are many reasons Apple Inc’s stock hasn’t been so hot lately, but a big one is that investors at large feel the American company [which sparked off the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and then put smartphones in people’s hands two decades later to shift our relationship with hi-tech gadgetry once again] lacks a compelling ‘story’ on artificial intelligence (AI). By that, they mean Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook doesn’t seem as if he has much of a plan. Google, to its credit, does have an AI story.
Unfortunately, it’s a tragicomedy. Caught on the hop by upstart OpenAI, the search engine company’s Gemini model is best known not for its intelligence, but for its depiction of the first US president George Washington (1732—1799) as an African-American man, the Catholic Pope as an Asian woman and other assorted embarrassments. This is all to say: the BFFs—that’s best frenemies forever—need each other’s support right now.
They have long been rivals as mobile platforms, but news about talks of a tie-up between the two, which would bring Google’s Gemini AI to Apple’s iPhone, is a deal that can solve short-term headaches for both of these Big Tech companies. The ‘GeminiPhone,’ a nickname I hope sticks purely because I know Apple will absolutely detest it, will give Apple devices a taste of the cutting-edge AI that all customers will soon expect as standard and developers are already demanding. Apple would have preferred, no doubt, to have built such a capability itself, but without the huge server farms on hand to train models, it has apparently been left behind (for now).
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