It's a game of Clash of the AI titans — and your mobile device is the battleground.
Google has entered a new and more intense phase of the AI wars, introducing its own Google Gemini app for iPhones; now you can use Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini on one device.
Only one of those services tries to give you what you need without gathering too much information about you.
What is Gemini?
Like most Google services, Google Gemini seems free, in that you don’t need to part with any cash credits to use it. Open it up, and you’ll find a chat window that also lets you get to a list of your previous chats. Speaking to Gemini is simple — text, voice, or even use a camera to point at something and you’ll get some answers. In other words, the app integrates the same features as you’ll find on the Gemini website, but it’s an app so that makes it cool.
Probably.
There is one more thing — access to the more conversational Gemini Live bot, which works a little like ChatGPT in voice mode. You can even assign access to Gemini as a shortcut on your iPhone’s Action button for fast access to the bot, which can also access and control any Google apps you’re brave enough to install on your iPhone.
All about Google
And that’s the thing, really. Like so much coming out of Silicon Valley now, Google Gemini is self-referencing.
You use Google on your iPhone to speak to a Google AI and access Google services, which gives you a more Android-like experience if you happen to have migrated to iOS from Android. You can use Gemini on your iPhone to control YouTube Music, for example, and you’ll get Google Maps if you ask for directions.
You even get supplementary privacy agreements for all those apps, some of which deliver exactly what you expect from Google the ads sales company, which is probably a little different than the privacy-first Apple experience you thought you were using. Gemini does put some protection in place, but your location data, feedback, and usage information can be reviewed by humans.
Most people won’t know this. Most people don’t read privacy agreements before accepting them. They should – but they are long, boring, and archaically written for a reason.
AI tribalism
If art reflects life and tech is indeed the new creativity, then the emergence of these equal but different digital tribes reflects the deeper tribalism that seems to be impacting every other part of life. Is that a good thing? Perhaps that depends on which state you live in.
At the end of days, Gemini on iPhone is your gateway to Google world, just as Windows takes you to Microsoft planet and Apple takes you to its own distorted reality, (subject to the EU). There are other tech worlds too, but this isn’t intended to be a definitive list of differing digital existences, especially now that these altered states have become both cloud- and service-based. It’s a battle playing out on every platform and on every device.
After all, if your primary computing experience becomes text- and voice-based, and the processors handling your requests are in the cloud, then it matters less which platform you use, as long as you get something you need. (It’s only later we’ll find that we get slightly less than what we need, with the difference between the two being the profit margin.)
Apple’s approach is to support those external services while building up its own AI suite with its own unique — and, if you ask me, vitally necessary — selling point around privacy. Others follow a different path, but it’s hard to ignore that control of your computational experience is the root of all these ambitions.
King of the hill
With its early mover advantage, OpenAI is not blind to the battle. Just this week it introduced support for different applications across Windows and Mac desktops. In a Nov. 14 message on X (for whomever remains genuinely active there), Open AI announced: “ChatGPT for macOS can now work with apps on your desktop. In this early beta for Plus and Team users, you can let ChatGPT look at coding apps to provide better answers.”
That means it will try to help when working in applications such as VS Code, Xcode, and Terminal. While you work, you can speak with the bot, get screenshots, share files and more. There is, of course, also a ChatGPT app for iPhones, and the first comparative reviews of the experience of using both Gemini and ChatGPT on an Apple device show pros and cons to both. Downstream vendors, most recently including Jamf, are relying on tools provided by the larger vendors to add useful tools to their own.
Google and OpenAI are not alone. Just last month, Microsoft introduced Copilot Vision, which it describes as autonomous agents capable of handling tasks and business functions, so you don’t need to. Apple, of course, remains high on its recent introduction of Apple Intelligence.
Things will get better before becoming worse
It’s a clash of the tech titans. And like every clash of the tech titans so far this century, you — or your business — are the product the titans are fighting for. That raises other questions such as how will they monetize your experience of AI.
How high will energy prices climb as a direct result of the spiraling electricity demands of these services? At what point will AI eat itself, creating emails from spoken summaries that are then in turn summarized by AI? When it comes to security and privacy, is even sovereign AI truly secure enough for use in regulated enterprise? Just how secure are Apple’s own AI servers?
And once the dominant players in the New AI Empire finally emerge, how, just how, will they do what Big Tech always does and follow Doctorow’s orders?
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