Apple could resolve to develop its own AI bot to answer questions

The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 shook the entire industry… but Apple let the train pass by.

John Giannandrea, who was then the head of AI within Apple, showed great skepticism about the potential of chatbots.

An Apple bot despite the hesitations

One must however admit the obvious: bots have clearly found their audience. For millions of users, it is the most obvious and straightforward gateway to generative AI. They are used to discuss, ask questions, help with homework, find ideas... Apple Intelligence infuses AI through a series of functions, but nothing that approaches a bot, except for the shaky integration of ChatGPT into Siri, which still too often redirects to Google results.

Despite internal reservations, Apple would have therefore established a new team called Answers, Knowledge and Information (AKI) tasked with developing a response engine whose description makes it resemble Perplexity. The idea is to search the web to answer general knowledge questions. An independent app is under consideration, and the necessary infrastructure to feed this engine would also be used for Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.

Job postings have indeed been published to strengthen this new team, supervised by Robby Walker. The latter is not an unknown: he indeed managed the integration of generative AI into Siri before Apple realized the project was falling behind. Will this executive have the shoulders to develop this ChatGPT competitor?

This answer engine is not a search engine, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. Apple has never deemed it necessary to develop a 'true' search engine, and for good reason: the manufacturer receives a comfortable check of 20 billion dollars (or more) signed by Google to ensure the default search engine position in Safari. But this payment is now in danger due to Google's abuse of dominant position in the United States.

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Source : Bloomberg