At WWDC 2026, Apple showed off a rebuilt version of Siri. The assistant runs on foundation models developed with Google. For complex queries, it taps Nvidia GPUs.
Apple used this year's Worldwide Developers Conference to unveil the next generation of Apple Intelligence and a ground-up rework of Siri. Marketed as "Siri AI," the new assistant can execute system-wide actions, read on-screen content, and pull personal context from messages, emails, and photos, according to Apple. A dedicated Siri app syncs conversations across all devices via iCloud.
Foundation models built with Google, cloud powered by Nvidia
Apple developed its "Apple Foundation Models" in close collaboration with Google, building on Gemini technology. During a Tech Talk after the keynote, Craig Federighi clarified just how far the partnership actually goes: "The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none." Apple doesn't use the Gemini app, the models Google ships to its own customers, or Google Search as a knowledge base. For world knowledge, Apple relies on its own "World Knowledge Service," which the company says it built over several years.
The third generation of AFM consists of five models: The four smaller ones - AFM Core, AFM Core Advanced, AFM Cloud, and AFM Cloud Image - were trained entirely for Apple Silicon and only "refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models," said Apple's AI lead Amar Subramanya. Only the top-tier model, AFM Cloud Pro, actually runs on Nvidia GPUs inside Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which has been expanded into Google Cloud for that purpose. Subramanya told CNBC that AFM Cloud Pro is comparable in quality to Google's Gemini frontier models. No benchmarks have been released yet.
