GM AI lover,

Apple may be turning to its biggest rival to help overhaul Siri. Reports indicate the company is in early talks with Google to use its Gemini AI, signaling a major strategic pivot to catch up in the AI race.

The partnership could deliver a vastly more capable AI assistant to iPhones much faster than an in-house solution. But does this potential deal signal a crack in Apple’s famous walled-garden strategy, showing that even tech giants can’t go it alone in the current landscape?

In today’s AI recap:

• Apple looks to Google's Gemini for new Siri

• Meta partners with Midjourney for AI visuals

• OpenAI model reverses cellular aging

• How AI shrunk a marketing team from 26 to 2

Siri Gets a Potential Gemini Boost

The Recap: Apple is reportedly in early talks with Google about using its Gemini AI to power a completely rebuilt Siri. This marks a major strategic shift, with Apple considering its biggest competitor to catch up in the AI race.

Unpacked:

• Google is already training a custom Gemini model designed to run on Apple's private servers for initial testing.

• Apple is developing two Siri versions internally: one using its own models and another built to run on external technology.

• The company has also explored similar partnerships with other major players, including Anthropic and OpenAI.

Bottom line: Bringing in a frontier model from a competitor could be the fastest way for you to get a vastly more capable AI assistant on your iPhone. The move also signals that Apple may be prioritizing product improvements over its traditional walled-garden approach after facing internal setbacks.

Meta Taps Midjourney's Vibe

The Recap: Meta has announced a partnership with Midjourney to integrate the independent lab's renowned 'aesthetic technology' into its future AI products. This move aims to upgrade the visual generation capabilities for Meta's billions of users.

Unpacked:

• The technical collaboration will combine teams from both companies to enhance visual features across Meta's entire product lineup, from Instagram to its other applications.

• Midjourney founder David Holz emphasized its independence, clarifying that the startup remains an independent, community-backed research lab with no investors despite the new partnership.

• This represents a major shift in strategy for Meta, which has historically focused on developing its creative AI models entirely in-house.

Bottom line: Users can expect to see Midjourney's distinct and popular visual style integrated directly into Meta's creative tools soon. The partnership highlights a growing trend where even the largest tech companies are looking to specialized external labs to maintain a competitive edge.

AI's Fountain of Youth

The Recap: OpenAI and Retro Biosciences just revealed a custom AI model that redesigns proteins to reverse cellular aging, achieving results 50 times more efficient than the original Nobel Prize-winning methods. This collaboration demonstrates how specialized AI can dramatically accelerate complex biological research.

Unpacked:

• Researchers built GPT-4b micro, an AI trained on biological data like protein sequences, to redesign the ‘Yamanaka’ proteins responsible for reprogramming aging cells.

• The AI achieved a hit rate of over 30% in suggesting superior protein designs, a significant leap from the sub-10% success rate of traditional screening methods.

• Beyond reprogramming cells, the AI-designed proteins also showed dramatically better DNA repair abilities, effectively reversing one of the key signatures of aging at a cellular level.

Bottom line: This breakthrough shows that specialized AI models trained by domain experts can solve problems that general-purpose AI would miss. It turns complex biology into a computational challenge, potentially compressing decades of lab work into weeks.

The 2-Person Marketing Team

The Recap: ZoomInfo's CEO Henry Schuck revealed in a recent podcast how the company used AI to shrink its product marketing team from 26 people to just two.

Unpacked:

• The two remaining team members at ZoomInfo now manage a suite of AI agents that automate the work of translating product information into marketing content.

• Schuck drove the company-wide shift with a clear directive to employees: lean into AI or risk becoming less valuable.

• The strategy is working, with employees creating over 1,000+ internal AI agents and two-thirds of the company using an AI chatbot daily.

Bottom line: This case study offers a clear look at AI's impact on corporate structures, shifting human roles from execution to AI management. Professionals are now being measured by their ability to leverage AI for efficiency, not just their direct output.

The Shortlist

xAI open-sourced its 314B parameter Grok 2.5 model, with Elon Musk teasing that Grok 3 will also be released as open source in approximately six months.

Brave exposed a critical vulnerability in Perplexity's Comet browser, demonstrating how hidden prompts on websites could hijack the AI to steal user data like emails and passwords.

YouTube confirmed that it is using AI to automatically upscale some videos on its platform without notifying or seeking consent from the original creators.

Filings revealed that Elon Musk asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to help finance a $97.4B takeover of OpenAI in February, though the deal was not agreed to.