Apple WWDC, Siri AI, And SpaceX Data Centers | The Brainstorm EP 135

**Nick** (0:00)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Brainstorm. We're down to man today. No, Sam, it is just myself and Brett Winton, and we're talking Apple and WWDC.
Maybe we finally have a smart Siri. Who knows? Brett, you and I have to be careful. We've been battling on this name for the last few years. We don't have our mediator, Sam today, but I think there's a lot to dive into.

**Brett Winton** (0:28)
It's a good thing we're not in the same room. We probably come to close.

**Nick** (0:31)
Exactly. It's always been a hot button for both you and I taking really the opposite side of where we think Apple will be long-term when it comes to AI. Today, I think we finally got some incremental news around what they plan to do with AI.
To me, it fits into what they should have been doing for the last few years. It's the first time we're starting to see them address AI in the way that I think everyone in the world outside of internal at Apple thinks they should have been addressing it. We'll dive right in.
First, name change for Siri. Siri is now being called Siri AI. It is getting a whole new back-end architecture. If people remember-

**Brett Winton** (1:12)
Is that a name change? It's the same name with AI on the end of it.

**Nick** (1:16)
Yeah, with AI on the end.

**Brett Winton** (1:17)
Well, that's new.

**Nick** (1:19)
That's a significant. For by Apple standards, that's pretty significant.

**Brett Winton** (1:23)
Just making sure. Keep going.

**Nick** (1:27)
In terms of what we're getting, there was news and we've talked about it on this show, that Apple would be distilling Google Gemini models, and so they did talk about that today. This is taking Apple Foundation models with Gemini models and pairing the two, so distilling what was useful from the Gemini suite of models, and bringing it to the Apple architecture and silicon. Now, you can have both on-device compute and they also have their own private servers. There's a bit of toggle between what will happen on-device and which devices will be able to do this, and then also what's going to be routed externally to the Cloud.
But it's very clear that Siri looks like it's going to be getting a major upgrade, as in now you can have deeper conversations, it is deeply integrated into all of your personal context, so you can query into your own messages, images, photos, you name it. Siri now has the ability to access that, which I think has been a big point, at least from my standpoint.

**Brett Winton** (2:26)
Isn't this what they announced? Was it two years ago?

**Nick** (2:30)
No.

**Brett Winton** (2:30)
It's the same setting.

**Nick** (2:31)
I would say what they announced two years ago versus today is much more in line with where the rest of the market is, versus what I think they announced two years ago was like playground mode, where it was like, here, we have ImageGen, and it can only do cartoon characters or-

**Brett Winton** (2:49)
No, those are the things they launched two years ago. But two years ago, I remember there being Apple Intelligence, and Apple, the stock was up, I don't know, high single digits percent. People are like, they finally get it, and this is the features they're going to ship. Then they didn't effectively ship most of those features. It turns out it was too hard for them. Haven't they gone back and maybe now they have a better chance of actually launching these features, but they're basically announcing the same stuff again?
Or is there like-

**Nick** (3:17)
No, no, I would say that this is building off of what they had previously announced and some of the features they ended up rolling out. So there are certain features within iOS that have Apple intelligence baked in. Now it's taking that and really kind of, I would say, unleashing the capability to the fullest extent of their new Apple Foundation models, which have been distilled by Gemini. So you're able to query into your chats, which I think is a big deal. You're able to push out directly to your calendar. So everything is deeply integrated now with both their first party and also some third party apps, depending on if the developer wants to use some of these capabilities.
In terms of what has already been announced, I would say it's very limited in scope compared to what they plan to announce. My biggest concern, and I think it gets back to your point, Brett, which is they made this announcement two years ago, and then we had to wait a few months to get access to it, and then it was pretty underwhelming. Well, I was watching this today and I was getting super excited. I'm like, oh my God, I'm finally going to be right, and Brett's going to have to sit there and be like, oh no, Nick, you were right. Then right at the end, like any good drug commercial, it was like this massive disclaimer of, this won't be launching until the fall because of beta and it won't be available in these languages and X, Y, and Z.