Apple in talks to use Google's AI for new Siri

PLUS: Meta partners with Midjourney for ‘aesthetic’ AI

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Apple is reportedly weeks away from a crossroads decision that could define Siri's future: Stick with their in-house AI models or swallow their pride and tap a rival for help.

With Google's Gemini now emerging as a candidate and custom models already in testing, the iPhone maker might soon rely on one of their biggest smartphone competitors to dig them out of an increasingly deep AI hole.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Apple explores Google’s Gemini to fix Siri

  • Meta partners with Midjourney for ‘aesthetic’ AI

  • Build an AI email agent that auto-schedules meetings

  • OpenAI, Retro Biosciences make old cells young again

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE & GOOGLE

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly in early talks with Google about using Gemini to power a completely rebuilt Siri, according to Bloomberg — following setbacks that pushed the voice assistant's major upgrade to 2026.

The details:

  • Apple had Google build a custom Gemini model that would run on Apple's private servers, with Google already training a version for testing.

  • The company is simultaneously developing two Siri versions internally: Linwood using Apple's own models and Glenwood running on external tech.

  • Apple has also explored similar partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI (with ChatGPT already helping power Siri’s answering capabilities).

  • Bloomberg reported that Apple is still “several weeks away” from a decision on both using internal vs. external models and who the partner would be.

Why it matters: For all the negativity surrounding Apple’s AI issues, moving externally to bring on one of the frontier labs could be the best possible outcome for iPhone users. The alternative is hoping Apple can develop its own — but with talent fleeing to rivals and already facing setbacks, it seems like a long and arduous path.

TOGETHER WITH ARTISAN

The Rundown: Meet Ava, your AI BDR that monitors your leads 24/7 and takes action the moment they’re ready to buy. Ava tracks high-intent signals like fundraise announcements, job postings and website visits — then enrolls leads into personalized, multi-channel sequences.

Ava operates within the Artisan platform, consolidating every outbound tool you need:

  • 300M+ high-quality B2B prospects

  • Automated lead enrichment across 10+ data sources

  • Multi-channel outreach with full email deliverability management

  • Live intent signal scraping with website visitor ID, fundraise announcements & more

Book a demo and supercharge your sales team.

META & MIDJOURNEY

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Meta just announced a new partnership with Midjourney to integrate the startup’s ‘aesthetic technology’ into future AI models and products, a major shift from the company’s in-house creative model development.

The details:

  • Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said the ‘technical collaboration’ will combine teams to upgrade visual capabilities across Meta's product lineup.

  • Meta currently has a series of visual generation tools, including Imagine, Movie Gen, and research-focused models like Dino V3.

  • Founder David Holz emphasized that Midjourney is still an “independent, community-backed research lab with no investors” despite the partnership.

  • Midjourney launched its first video generation capabilities in June with its V1 model, giving users the ability to turn images into five-second extendable clips.

Why it matters: Meta bringing Midjourney aesthetics to its billions of users would be a big change from the quality seen in its previous in-house models, with MJ having a special vibe that is just hard to match. Meta is also showing a new willingness to look externally (not just poach talent) to help push its own AI development forward.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build an AI agent for your inbox that you can CC into any email to automatically find meeting times and book directly in your Google Calendar.

Step-by-step:

  1. Sign up for Lindy AI (Rundown University members get a discount perk) and duplicate our pre-built template

  2. Configure triggers: set your AI's email address (e.g., [email protected]) and whitelist your personal email as the filtered sender

  3. The agent works in two modes: Direct Booking (you specify "Tuesday 2PM") or Time Finding (agent checks calendar and suggests options)

  4. Adjust availability blocks in "Find Available Times" - set your workday start/end hours and available days

  5. Test both modes, then simply CC your AI assistant on any scheduling email

Pro tip: Add team members' emails as "from" conditions and connect their calendars — this lets anyone CC the agent to coordinate meetings across everyone's availability.

PRESENTED BY GALILEO

The Rundown: How are you evaluating your AI outputs? Instead of relying on vibe checks, learn how the experts quickly and accurately evaluate AI using LLM judges.

Download Galileo’s newest eBook for 70 pages of insights on:

  • How to automate evaluations to score, explain, and flag quality issues

  • Advanced techniques like token-level scoring, Chain-of-Thought, and pairwise comparison

  • Practical frameworks and code examples for building your own LLM judges

AI RESEARCH

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just published a case study with Retro Biosciences, using a custom AI model to redesign proteins that turn cells into stem cells, achieving 50x better efficiency than the original Nobel-Prize winning versions discovered in 2012.

The details:

  • Researchers built GPT-4b micro, an AI trained on biological data rather than internet text, to redesign ‘Yamanaka’ proteins that reprogram aging cells.

  • The AI-designed proteins converted the cells into stem cells 50x more efficiently, showing dramatically better DNA repair abilities.

  • The results essentially reversed one of the key signatures of aging at the cellular level, with multiple labs validating the results across testing methods.

Why it matters: While public models are leveling up users in their own work, custom models trained by domain experts could unlock discoveries that general-purpose AI would never find — turning biology, chemistry, and materials science into computational playgrounds where decades of lab work compresses into weeks.

QUICK HITS

  • 📊 Julius - Your AI Data Analyst. Connect your data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. No coding required.*

  • 🧠 Command A Reasoning - Cohere’s new enterprise reasoning model

  • 🌱 Seed-OSS - ByteDance’s family of open-source reasoners with long-context

  • ⚙️ Qoder - Alibaba’s free agentic coding platform

*Sponsored Listing

New court filings revealed that Elon Musk asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to help finance a $97.4B takeover of OpenAI in February, though Meta did not agree to the letter of intent.

xAI open-sourced its older Grok 2.5 model, with Elon Musk saying Grok 3 will also be made open source in “about 6 months.”

OpenAI announced the opening of a new office in New Delhi, coming on the heels of its new $5/mo ChatGPT GO plan specifically for the region.

Elon Musk and xAI introduced MacroHard, a ‘purely AI software company’ aimed at replicating competitors like Microsoft using simulations and AI agents.

Meta FAIR researchers released DeepConf, a method of deep thinking that achieved 99.9% on the AIME benchmark using open-source models.

Baidu launched MuseStreamer 2.0, a family of image-to-video models, with upgrades in multi-character coordination, synced audio outputs, and lower pricing.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Mark H. in Detroit, MI:

"I use AI to make artsy things in my brain a reality. I will start with a crude drawing, then put that into chat gpt to create a prompt from that drawing then put thata prompt into Krea AI to generate a realist AI image to my liking then use an image-to-3d model to create a 3D file which I then 3D print. Pretty neat to take a concept in my brain to a physical product in a few steps — I love this future."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer—the humans behind The Rundown

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