Google right now offers plenty of AI inference for free for everyone on the planet. They also offered their £20 AI pro package for free for over a year for all students. I use that and its a very generous offering. Some more free AI inference for Apple users (where you've now selected for high income folk, simply by virtue of being Apple users) would make plenty of sense, I imagine.
replyIt makes no sense at all. Google offers free but limited Gemini in exchange for being able to train their models on user data.
replyThey are also gradually introducing advertising to Gemini and they can upsell and cross sell their paid plans (Gemini, Google One, Youtube, Workspace) to a large pool of users across all their apps, platforms and integrations.
They can do none of that with the white label models they to rent to Apple. That's why Apple will always have to pay for it directly.
This is very different from the search deal Apple has with Google. Under that deal, Apple sends users straight to Google along with all the advertising revenue it brings. Google returns some of that revenue to Apple.