When Even Apple Rents Its Intelligence
will apple have its nokia moment? how long can a hardware company fall behind on ai
Apple’s $1B-a-year deal with Google Gemini may be the most humbling pivot in its history.
For a company that built its empire on control — from silicon to store shelves — outsourcing Siri’s brain signals a quiet surrender in the generative AI race.
Inside the Collapse
Siri’s decline wasn’t sudden. ColdFusion’s Dagogo Altraide traces years of dysfunction: rival AI teams, missed deadlines, and a culture allergic to the unpredictability of generative systems. The result? Lawsuits, vaporware, and a broken promise called Apple Intelligence.
Why Gemini Became the Lifeline
Apple’s fix is pragmatic, not proud — paying Google roughly $1B annually to license a custom Gemini model. That means Siri’s long-awaited context awareness and summarization finally arrive, while Apple keeps its privacy-first pledge through Private Cloud Compute servers. But this is a patch, not a pivot. The company still aims to build its own trillion-parameter model to reclaim independence.
The Bigger Question: Should Anyone Build?
Here’s the twist: if Apple — the richest, most secretive tech brand — chooses to lease intelligence, what does that say about the rest of us?
ColdFusion’s analogy lands hard:
LLMs are the “operating systems” of AI. What matters now is who builds the best apps on top.
Perhaps Apple’s embarrassment is the industry’s lesson — that in the coming years, success won’t belong to those who own the biggest models, but to those who deploy them best.
→ Watch the full ColdFusion video: Why Apple Just Gave Up on AI
Source: ColdFusion, hosted by Dagogo Altraide (author of New Thinking*)*