Google Partners with Apple to Develop AI Foundation Models

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.GEMINI DEAL:Alphabet'sGoogle stated in a, "Appleand Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google's Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."AI-BASED SHOPPING:Google has revealed a set of tools for retailers to assist them in launching AI agents, with Kroger, Papa John's, and Lowe'sannouncing they are already using Google's tools to prepare for the wave of AI-assisted shopping and ordering, Belle Lin of The Wall Street Journal.SB ENERGY INVESTMENT:SB Energy, a SoftBankcompany, announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft-backedOpenAI as part of Stargate, marking a "significant step forward in the build out of next-generation artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure in the United States." The investment builds on the $500B Stargate commitment announced in January at the White House, SB said. OpenAI and SoftBank Group are each investing $500M into SB Energy. OpenAI has also selected SB Energy to build and operate its previously-announced 1.2 GW data center site in Milam County. OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman said, "Partnering with SB Energy brings together their strength in data center infrastructure and energy development and OpenAI's deep domain expertise in data center engineering. The result is a fast, reliable way to scale compute through large, highly optimized AI data centers."AI ADOPTION:Goldman Sachs assumed coverage of Microsoft with a Buy rating and $655 price target. The firm assumed coverage of 12 stocks in the software sector. Goldman believes artificial intelligence adoption will be a "positive tailwind" to the software total addressable market over the next ten years. Goldman says Microsoft is best positioned to capture AI adoption upside.DENIES TALKS:AI21 Labs, an Israeli AI company, has denied reports that it is in talks to be acquired by Nvidia, Globes' Assaf Gilead. "AI21 values Nvidia as a business partner and investor but reports of negotiations for a possible acquisition are incorrect. The company has not held discussions with Nvidia about an acquisition," AI21 said in a statement.NATERA COLLABORATION:Nateraannounced a new collaboration with Nvidia to accelerate the development of Natera's multimodal AI foundation model platform and expand applications across precision medicine. Under the collaboration, Natera will integrate its unique longitudinal and multi-time point in vivo datasets and proprietary machine learning models with Nvidia's high-performance computing platforms, accelerated libraries, and AI frameworks. Together, the companies aim to establish the computational infrastructure required to train and deploy large scale AI models on complex medical datasets, enabling more precise diagnostics, deeper biological insight, and new tools to support personalized therapeutic decisions. Natera will utilize several NVIDIA platforms under the collaboration, including Nvidia Parabricks for accelerating bioinformatics workflows; Nvidia BioNeMo for optimizing large-scale model training; and Nvidia NeMo Agent Toolkit for building multi-agent AI systems designed for clinical and research use. Early engineering milestones show an average reduction of 75.7% in running time and 59.2% in cost using Parabricks for genomic analysis, and 45.5% gains in training speed by integrating Nvidia Transformer Engine.AI CO-INNOVATION LAB:Nvidia and Eli Lillyannounced a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI to tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry. The lab brings together Lilly's world-leading expertise in discovering, developing and manufacturing medicines with Nvidia's leadership in AI, accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with top AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia, allowing them to work side by side to generate large-scale data and build powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using Nvidia BioNeMo as the critical platform. The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly's agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another.THERMO COLLABORATION:At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Nvidia announced what it calls "a major expansion" of Nvidia BioNeMo, an open development platform that enables lab-in-the-loop workflows to develop breakthroughs in AI-driven biology and drug discovery. In conjunction, Nvidia and Eli Lilly announced a AI co-innovation lab that they say is "focused on applying AI to tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry." In addition, Nvidia says it is collaborating with Thermo Fisherto build autonomous lab infrastructure for scalable scientific discovery. "Biology and drug discovery are reaching their transformer moments. BioNeMo turns experimental data into usable intelligence for AI, so every experiment informs the next. This creates a continuous learning cycle that speeds up discovery and helps researchers build new frontier models to tackle some of biology's toughest challenges," said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia.