Welcome to 9 to 5 Mac Daily for Thursday, March 26th, 2026.

I'm your host, Chance Miller.

We are sponsored this week by Backblaze.

Leading off the day, we talked yesterday about new Bloomberg reporting about what to expect from Siri and iOS 27.

And now a new report from the information goes behind the scenes on Apple's deal with Google to use Gemini models to power future Siri features.

The report says that Apple's partnership with Google is deeper than previously known.

As part of the agreement, Apple reportedly gets a lot more

freedom with Google's technology than we expected. Apple reportedly has complete access to the

Gemini model in its own data center facilities. Apple can use that access to produce smaller

models that power specific tasks or are small enough

to run directly on Apple's devices so they can run the tasks faster.

This process of producing new offshoot models is called distillation.

It's a way in which one LLM can transfer knowledge to smaller, more streamlined models.

The benefit of this is that smaller models can be more efficient, requiring LLM can transfer knowledge to smaller, more streamlined models.

The benefit of this is that smaller models can be more efficient, requiring less computing power and delivering faster results.

They may make more sense for running on-device than larger models that need to live in the cloud.

Since Apple has full access to Gemini, its student model can also learn to imitate the internal computations that Gemini uses to arrive at its answers, which can be more

effective than just imitating the answers that it spits out. The report also reiterates what we've

heard before, which is that Apple's foundation models team is not giving up on its own in-house models.

It's still working on models that Apple could use down the road to abandon Google, but as of right now, it's not clear what the imminent goals for that team are.

Finally, the report reaffirms that Apple is planning to unveil big Siri changes at WWDC in June,

including the ability to remember past conversations it had with a customer,

...