Apple building a standalone app with ChatGPT-like search experience

Apple is rumored to be building an “answer engine” that would provide a “ChatGPT-like search experience,” with a standalone app being reportedly considered.

To that end, the company has created a new “Answers” team tasked with the development of a stripped-down rival to ChatGPT that would crawl the web to provide answers to questions, Mark Gurman writes in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg.

“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.”

Apple is building an answer engine with a ChatGPT-like search experience

The company has posted multiple related job listings on its website. It is seeking engineers in the United States and China for an Answers, Knowledge, and Information team with the goal of improving Siri, Spotlight, Safari and more.

Among the recent job listings is one where the company is seeking engineers to help ti develop large language models that are “responsible for answering users’ questions using their personal documents with privacy at the forefront.”

These efforts seem to be in addition to a more personalized version of Siri, which Apple announced during the WWDC 2024 keynote but delayed until 2026, which will be able to tap into user data and perform actions across apps to answer user questions like when Mom’s flight is landing.

Apple must win in AI

Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a recent conference call with analysts that “We’re making good progress on a more personalized Siri, and as we’ve said before, we expect to release these features next year.”

Gurman reported earlier that Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees Apple must win in AI, reportedly telling them, “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab.”

He allegedly reminded employees that Apple is never first to market, but when it does enter a certain category, it usually brings new value. “We’ve rarely been first,” Cook reportedly said. “There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before the iPod.”

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