Apple may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet but the tech giant has struggled to get its AI initiatives going while rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been taking over the market. After a long delay, Apple finally announced its artificial intelligence features dubbed Apple Intelligence at the WWDC conference last year but it would be an understatement to say that things have not gone according to the company’s plans.
Not only has its much-awaited Siri revamp been delayed for months, several other AI features have run into controversies for being inaccurate and generally less effective than those offered on rival devices such as Google’s Pixel and Samsung’s Galaxy series.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, however, is in no mood to back down from the AI race and he reportedly told his employees earlier in the month that AI could be as big as the internet and Apple is in it to win this battle.
Soon after that, we have a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that states that Apple is now working on a stripped-down version of ChatGPT with search capabilities. What’s interesting is that Apple has previously dismissed the need for a chatbot, arguing that there is limited consumer interest for that experience.
Currently, Siri has the ability to turn to ChatGPT for answering difficult questions. The company has also previously hinted at the possibility of talking to other AI-based search providers like Perplexity to provide a new experience to its users. However, if Gurman is to be believed, Apple is now going in the direction of building its own chatbot experience catered for search.
Apple to build ChatGPT like chatbot:
Reportedly, Apple formed a new team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI, earlier in the year with the goal of creating a ChatGPT-like search experience. The team is led by Robby Walker, a senior director at the iPhone maker who reports directly to AI Chief John Giannandrea.
Walker was previously tasked with overseeing the development of Siri but had lost those responsibilities after numerous delays in rolling out an AI-powered version of the voice assistant. Apart from Walker, several other key members of the Siri team have also joined the AKI team to develop an “answer engine”.
While the work is still in its early stages, the report notes that the answer engine will be a system capable of crawling the web in order to respond to general knowledge questions. Meanwhile, a standalone app for this new tool is under exploration along with back-end infrastructure that will be needed to power these capabilities in the future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.
The Cupertino-based tech giant has also begun advertising for its new AKI team with a posting on its careers site stating, “Our work fuels intuitive information experiences across some of Apple’s most iconic products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, Lookup, and more. Join us in shaping the future of how the world connects with information!”