Unlikely; this will likely be focused on on-device search of your personal or other local data and relevant context from the web. This has always been Apple's focus, and the opportunity to 10X this with LLMs is profound. Access to your private data has always been the key to making a breakthrough intelligent agent and Apple is better positioned to make headway here than anyone else (except maybe Google Pixel but the marketshare is tiny).

There is really no need for Apple to step into web search when (1) they don't inherently have a value-add beyond making your searches more private, which they already can do, and (2) from a revenue standpoint they already tax Google billions a year for preferred placement.

This is total speculation on my part, but I read an article recently claiming that Apple had struck a deal with Google to leverage their Gemini models. Here’s an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/technology/apple-google-a...

Broken link?

Why would Apple give up 18 billion dollars (per year) from Google?

Privacy? That's just a marketing slogan, they are tracking you across first party apps. And privacy is never worth 18 billion dollars.

The one where Google pays them $20 billion a year?