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TWiT 1088: Model Not Available - Anthropic's Fable Shutdown & Apple's Siri Update
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Apple WWDC 2026: New Siri and Apple Intelligence Reviewed
At 1:16:22 · chapter starts 1:05:00
The panel shifts to Monday's Apple WWDC, where the new Siri was the centrepiece. Harry McCracken, who attended the event, installed the developer beta on his working iPhone and iPad, and reports the system is unusually stable for a day-one beta. The new Siri can perform cross-app agentic tasks — finding email reservations and adding them to Calendar, for example — things Apple promised two years ago and paid $250M in a settlement for not delivering. The AI architecture is layered: a 3B on-device model, a 20B on-device MoE model, and Apple's Private Cloud Compute running on NVIDIA GPUs on Google Cloud infrastructure. Apple insists this is not white-labeled Gemini; the Gemini LLM is one ingredient in Apple Foundation Models that were apparently post-trained using Gemini Frontier outputs. Christina Warren points out that Apple couldn't do advertising when it lacked cloud capacity, subtly questioning the privacy-first framing. The panel debates whether Siri will become most people's primary AI interface or whether users already committed to ChatGPT or Claude will stick with those.
After paying a $250 million settlement for false advertising, Apple shipped a Siri that can actually do what it shows in demos — pulling emails, scheduling from reservations, creating Shortcuts with natural language. It's not the most capable AI, but it's the most integrated one.
Apple paid a $250 million class-action settlement for falsely advertising AI capabilities for Siri two years before WWDC 2026.