Apple Inc. is in talks with Alphabet Inc.-owned Google to license the company’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine for use on the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported today.

Gemini is Google’s family of generative AI models, formerly known as Bard, used for creating chatbots capable of mimicking human speech, summarizing articles, analyzing data, understanding and producing images.

According to the report, Apple is currently in “active negotiations” for Gemini to power new features coming to the iPhone later this year. The iPhone maker also held discussions with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and has openly considered using its model, according to the same sources.

Apple has been working on and testing its own generative AI system known internally as Ajax since early last year and employees have been testing out a chatbot dubbed Apple GPT. However, according to Bloomberg, the state of Apple’s generative AI tools are still far behind competitors and this makes a partnership look like a better deal.

Bloomberg reported that Apple intended to use its own internal AI models in the upcoming iOS 18 iPhone operating system for onboard AI capabilities, but was seeking a partnership with a cloud-based generative AI provider to do “heavy lifting” for other functionality. For example, Google Gemini would help power phone capabilities for generating images and writing essays based on user prompts.

As a result, it’s not expected that details about these updates will be unveiled until June during the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference when Apple will likely talk about iOS 18 and its upcoming features.

This potential partnership arrives after Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said last month that the company intended to invest more “significantly” in generative AI and that he intended to reveal more about Apple’s plans later this year.

A partnership with Apple to deploy the Gemini models on iPhones will be the largest partnership for Gemini to date. It could bring Google’s AI model to more than 2 billion devices in active use worldwide. In January, Google partnered with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to feature Gemini on the company’s flagship Galaxy S24 to become among the first devices in the world to integrate the AI model.

Google’s Pixel 8, the company’s current highest-end phone, currently runs on Gemini Nano – the smallest Gemini model that’s capable of running on phones. Gemini Nano allows the Pixel 8 to understand conversations that have been voice recorded, summarize them and suggest voice replies in chat messages.

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