That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.

Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.

It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.

I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.

I think the difference is scale. This is Apple, so it's an enormous amount of devices. And it's a seamless experience, to the user, going from local model to cloud models.

So the question about which model Apple was going to use and where has been highly anticipated, especially by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Imagine if either one could say they have Apple as their customer?

Apple certainly has the cash to burn if they wanted to train their own model, but it also always seemed out of their core competency. This is a major win for Google.

So "business as usual" but with huge implications for the AI ecosystem in general.