Apple has fallen far behind in the competitive market of AI-powered chatbots, but it may have a plan for an in-house option that aligns with the company’s “not first, but best” philosophy. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple created a team called “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” earlier this year that’s tasked with developing a “stripped-down rival to ChatGPT.” Engadget reported.
Forming his team represents a major change in direction from Apple’s earlier stance on artificial intelligence when the company partnered with OpenAI in 2024 to infuse Siri with ChatGPT instead of developing its own chatbot.
Now, Gurman reported that this new Apple team will instead develop in-house AI services for a “new ChatGPT-like search experience” that can crawl the web to respond to questions. These new capabilities could be a standalone app, as well as support AI capabilities for Apple’s Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, according to Grumman’s sources.
MacRumors reported: As of writing, Apple’s careers website has more than a dozen job listings for the team across the U.S. and China. For example, Apple is looking to hire a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help with “improving Siri’s ability to answer personal domain questions.”
The job listing says the team develops large language models that are “responsible for answering users’ questions, using their personal documents with privacy the forefront.
In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said he was told that the team is in the early stages of developing a “new ChatGPT-like search experience,” and it is apparently even exploring a “standalone app” for such functionality.
“While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an ‘answer engine’ – a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions,” wrote Gurman. “A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.”
Cult Of Mac reported: Apple’s new internal team, “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” is apparently developing a ChatGPT-like search tool. It will reportedly use an “answer engine” that will crawl the web to answer simple search queries.
Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft each offer an AI-powered chatbot designed to quickly answer general user search queries. This has played a rote in changing the search landscape dramatically. Apple, however, is not in the race, as Apple Intelligence does not offer any search capabilities. Instead, Apple hands over such tasks to ChatGPT.
The “answer engine” system will reportedly crawl the web to respond to common user questions. The company may launch it as a standalone app, with the same backend eventually powering search results across Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.
Apple is also hiring engineers with experience in search algorithms and engine development for the team.