Earlier this month, a pair of Bloomberg reports indicated Apple will partner with Google to power its highly anticipated Siri upgrades. I was initially hopeful this would prove a smart solution, but now following the rollout of Gemini 3 last week, I’m more excited than ever for the new Siri in iOS 26.4.
Gemini 3’s debut has earned Google all kinds of acclaim
If you’ve paid much attention to AI news in the last week, you’ll know that Google released Gemini 3 to significant acclaim.
Hayden Field at The Verge has rounded up some of the initial praise of Google’s latest model.
She writes that it’s “blown past OpenAI and other competitors’ products on a range of benchmarks and is topping the charts on LMArena, a crowdsourced AI evaluation platform that’s essentially the Billboard Hot 100 of AI model ranking.” Several other big achievements are mentioned:
“This is more than a leaderboard shuffle,” said Wei-Lin Chiang, cofounder and CTO of LMArena. Chiang told The Verge that Gemini 3 Pro holds a “clear lead” in occupational categories including coding, match, and creative writing, and its agentic coding abilities “in many cases now surpass top coding models like Claude 4.5 and GPT-5.1.” It also got the top spot on visual comprehension and was the first model to surpass a ~1500 score on the platform’s text leaderboard. […]
Alex Conway, principal software engineer at DataRobot, told The Verge that one of Gemini 3’s most notable advancements was on a specific reasoning benchmark called ARC-AGI-2. Gemini scored almost twice as high as OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pro while running at one-tenth of the cost per task
The piece also highlights a post from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X, who writes: “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”
In other words, Google’s latest work is proving a milestone in AI advancement.
And that’s excellent news for Apple and Siri.
Gemini 3’s success is fantastic news for Apple and Siri
Apple and Google have reportedly partnered on the underlying technology that will power Siri’s big AI upgrades coming in iOS 26.4.
All signs indicate that from a user-facing standpoint, Apple won’t advertise that Google is involved. And user privacy won’t be impacted either.
It won’t be like the current ChatGPT integration with Siri. It’s not an optional add-on extension. Instead, the core of Apple’s ‘default Siri’ will get an upgrade that utilizes Google’s AI prowess.
The new Siri will be an Apple product, with Apple’s privacy standards in place, but its intelligence will be powered in large part by a Google-developed 1.2 trillion parameter AI model.
Meaning that arguably the current leader in AI models will be powering the new Siri.
We don’t know the exact details on how this new model was developed, but it’s a safe bet that Google’s work on Gemini 3 has been influential in its Siri work too.
When news of the Google partnership first broke, my first take was positive. But now after seeing what Gemini 3 has accomplished, I’m more excited than ever for the new Siri.
Delivering on its Siri promises is one of Apple’s most important tasks in 2026. And Gemini 3’s success has wiped out the last of my doubts about the solution Apple has chosen.
How are you feeling about Apple partnering with Google to power the new Siri? Let us know in the comments.
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