Here’s a little bit of positivity on Apple’s race to catch up to the competition in artificial intelligence. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is testing its own chatbot internally and has made significant progress in catching up with ChatGPT in the last six months. The report explains that Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea was initially reluctant to turn Siri into a ChatGPT-like chatbot, as he doubted the actual value of such tools. Despite those reservations, however, Apple executives are now “pushing to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. And while it may come as a surprise, it sounds like Apple is seeing early success in this effort, at least internally. Apple executives reportedly believe that the current version of the internal chatbot is “on par with recent versions of ChatGPT.” From the report: As for Apple’s homegrown chatbot efforts, some executives are now pushing, despite Giannandrea’s prior reluctance, to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. To that end, the company has started discussing the idea of giving the assistant the ability to tap into the open web to grab and synthesize data from multiple sources. According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT. The question, of course, is whether Apple can keep up the pace. It has not shipped a version of Siri powered by LLMs or adopted any sort of chatbot-style features powered by its own models. The risk is that Apple continues to fall further behind as its competitors continue to ship new models and features to their respective chatbot platforms. Apple is reportedly not planning to announce any major updates for Siri at WWDC next month. At the earliest, Apple’s “LLM Siri” platform is expected to debut later in the iOS 19 cycle. You can read the full report from Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett on Bloomberg’s website. My favorite iPhone accessories: Follow Chance: Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, and Mastodon.  Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel #apple #executives #think #its #internal

Apple's executives are pushing for Siri to become a proper AI chatbot that scours the web, potentially as a direct competitor to ChatGPT. It's just not clear when that's going to happen.Apple's leadership wants Siri to have ChatGPT-style smarts. As part of the Apple Intelligence shift, Apple said it would overhaul Siri to be more context-aware, but that change has yet to arrive. However, if the urges of Apple's chiefs to change course work, Siri could become even more powerful down the road.According to Apple employees speaking to Bloomberg on Sunday, Apple executives are keen to make Siri into a competitor to current top chat bot, ChatGPT. While former Siri chief John Giannandrea was apparently reluctant to go down that route, the company's leadership are leaning to go that way with Siri. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums #sirigpt #apple039s #chiefs #hope #add

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”See More: #apple #trying #get #llm #siri

Apple may have started late, and hit some speedbumps along the way, but Apple's Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, John Giannandrea, wants to beat Apple Intelligence into shape before handing over the reins to a successor.John Giannandrea is focusing on finally making Siri a more competitive AI engine.Giannandrea is still in charge of AI and Large Language Modelresearch, AI analysts, and integrating those technologies into the larger OS infrastructures. A report from Bloomberg suggests that some Apple executives would like to see his role reduced further, ahead of a near-future departure.Apple leadership reportedly wants to put Giannandrea on a path to retirement and the eventual naming of a successor. That said, the executive still attracts top engineers and researchers to Apple, so for now he's staying put. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums #apple039s #head #john #giannandrea #isn039t

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”See More: #apple #trying #get #llm #siri

In a new, lengthy report regarding Apple’s AI strategy, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has detailed a number of strategic failures for the launch of Apple Intelligence. As many of us have already believed, Apple was caught off-guard by the new generative AI trend. Additionally, according to Gurman, Apple is ‘unlikely’ to spend a lot of time talking about Siri at this years WWDC. That includes future upgrades and the already announcedfeatures from last years WWDC. What went wrong with Apple Intelligence I won’t be summarizing the entire report, so if you’d like to read it in full – you can do so here. In short, Apple software chief Craig Federighi didn’t believe a ton in AI. He was “reluctant” to invest a lot into the technology, and didn’t see it as a “core capability.” In Federighi’s eyes, it’d take away from everything else without actually paying off. This wasn’t just a Craig Federighi thing, though: Other leaders shared Federighi’s reservations. “In the world of AI, you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment,” another longtime executive says. “That’s not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the endgame is.” The report also claims that while other executives were “convinced” AI would be “revolutionary”, they were unable to convince Federighi. A lot of it “fell on deaf ears.” On top of that, Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was never truly able to hit the ground running. When he started at Apple, he concluded that Apple would need to spend a lot more money than it currently is. However, his efforts were “often stymied.” The future As for how Apple plans to bounce back from this strategic failure, well – we won’t find out quite yet. According to Gurman, that won’t be too big of a focus at next months WWDC, where Apple will announce iOS 19 and more: Significant upgrades to Siri—including the ones promised nearly a year ago—are unlikely to be discussed much and are still months away from shipping. The report reaffirms that Apple plans on adding additional Apple Intelligence capabilities to other apps, and that the company is also planning on adding an AI powered battery optimization tool. Apple also plans on launching Project Mulberry, a virtual health coach. Apple also is working on implementing a new capability for European Union residents: the ability to ditch Siri entirely. Instead of having Siri as your voice assistant, you’ll be able to use third-party options. Specific third-party options weren’t named, but it’s worth noting that this will be a distinct feature from the already-existing ChatGPT integration in Siri. Last but not least, Apple is continuing to work on its new “LLM Siri” infrastructure, which’ll fix a lot of the engineering mess that got us to severely-delayed Siri in the first place. Despite that, the company wants to separate Siri from Apple Intelligence in its marketing efforts: The Apple sources say the company, despite its hopes for LLM Siri, is also preparing to separate the Apple Intelligence brand from Siri in its marketing. It’s a tacit admission that the voice assistant’s poor reputation isn’t helping the company’s AI messaging.  Apple also wants to stop touting features more than a few months before they’re able to launch, according to the report. My favorite Apple accessory recommendations: Follow Michael: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel #gurman #siri #upgrades #unlikely #discussed