Following the management shakeup that saw Apple dump John Giannandrea as its head of AI and bring trusted manager Craig Federighi in to oversee the redevelopment of Siri, there’s news that Apple is no longer wedded to the idea of using its own LLMs.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the foundation upon which AI applications are built. There are now dozens of open source LLMs available for developers – OpenAI, DeepSeek, Grok and Gemini are amongst the most well known. But, until Federighi took over, Apple’s engineers could only use those models to benchmark the performance of their own models.
The big shift is that Apple’s engineers can now, per a report published at The Information [subscription], integrate third-party LLMs into Siri for better performance. From an end-user perspective the actual LLM that is used, whether that’s Apple’s bespoke one or an open source solution, is irrelevant. What matters is the speed and accuracy of the tool.
One of the interesting pieces of information from that article is that Apple demonstrated features at WWDC 2024 that were not yet built. Typically, when Apple shows off a new feature, they have it working on demo devices and in early stage software. But the Apple Intelligence features shown off last year were supposedly faked.
The move to use third-party LLMs is critical. The poor response to Apple Intelligence was likely to be highlighted at WWDC 2025. But by integrating third-party LLMs, Apple can move forward faster than if it was developing its own LLMs. It gets to release a better product and it gives the company time to continue developing its own LLMs and slowly reduce its reliance on third party providers.
In a way, this mimics their hardware strategy. Apple started putting its own chips into the iPhone and iPad before moving to the Mac. The release of the company’s first modem chip begins a transition away from Qualcomm and a new Wi-Fi chip will enable them to reduce dependence on Broadcom. While Apple will be using OpenAI, and potentially other, LLMs to power the next iteration of Siri, they can slowly wean themselves away as they increase the performance of their software.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.