#24 - The iPhone That Thinks in Google. Europe Gets the Car Without the Engine — and a 24-Hour Clock Starts Friday

Imagine you buy a Mercedes S-Class and the dealer tells you the engine this year comes from Lada. And if you want it delivered to Austria, it comes without the engine. That is the new iPhone: a $2,100 to $3,000 phone whose Siri runs on Google's Gemini — and in the EU, no Siri AI at all.

Recorded before John Ternus walked on stage for his first keynote as Apple's CEO. Today: who gets the good Siri and who doesn't, why ChatGPT hallucinates more in Hindi than in English, what an AI-written national AI policy did to South Africa, and a 24-hour clock that starts on Friday for everyone in Europe selling anything with a plug and a chip — including a toaster with Wi-Fi.

In this episode:

🍏 The iPhone that thinks in Google (02:58) — "Surprise and shine", Ternus's first keynote, the iPhone 18 Pro and the first folding iPhone. Apple is not a frontier-model house, so it reportedly pays Google about $1 billion a year for a custom Gemini. The rollout map: English only, China excluded, and no Siri AI on the iPhone in the EU — Apple blames the Digital Markets Act. Malcolm's take: expect many more "later in the EU" launches while the political pressure lasts.

🌍 Safe in English only (08:03) — a third of ChatGPT users ask it about their health; so does Malcolm. Sumiya Khan, 16, New Delhi, asked in Hindi about constant fatigue and was told it was stress. It was iron-deficiency anaemia. A Rest of World investigation: guardrails hold in English and slip in low-resource languages. In Tigrinya, spoken by 9 million people, machine translation turned smallpox into syphilis and "intravenous antibiotics" into "intravenous insecticides". If your company chatbot serves ten countries, it is not the same chatbot in Hungarian or Hebrew.

🏛️ Zurich and South Africa (12:26) — on Monday the ETH Zürich hosted its first AI Governance Forum with the Council of Europe, on the road to the Geneva AI Summit 2027: human rights, control, many disciplines at one table. And the counter-example: South Africa's cabinet-approved national AI policy, published 10 April, had to be withdrawn because its references were AI hallucinations. Don't laugh at the South Africans — this happens at the big consultancies too.

⏱️ Europe's 24-hour clock (16:36) — from Friday 11 September the Cyber Resilience Act's reporting duty applies: an actively exploited vulnerability in any product with digital elements must be reported within 24 hours, with the detailed notification within 72 hours. Try getting a customer's head of IT to pull machine data on a Friday evening. ONEKEY surveyed 200 German industrial companies: 45% barely knew the rule existed, 62% expect the 24 hours to be very hard to meet.

🧵 The Thursday thread (19:38) — who gets the good Siri, who gets the safe chatbot, who has to report. And a new place to read the show: the AI Neanderthal Substack — short articles, the quotes exactly as said on air, lots of pictures.

One thing to do this week: if you sell anything with a chip in Europe, decide today who in your company may press "report" on a Saturday morning — and give them a deputy.

📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904

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AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious. Stay human.