(Credit: Emily Forlini)
Is Apple finally admitting it hasn't quite figured out how to compete in AI? The company has reportedly held talks with OpenAI and Anthropic about using their AI models to power the updated version of Siri, Bloomberg reports.
The effort is in the "early stages," says Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. For now, Apple has asked both companies to create versions of their models that would work on Apple's cloud infrastructure as a test. However, if either option is better than Apple's existing Foundation Models (which it just open-sourced to developers), making the switch would be a "monumental reversal" in AI strategy, Gurman notes.
Apple Intelligence already works with OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google Gemini might be next. But ChatGPT is an add-on; Apple Intelligence powers the platform.
(Credit: Emily Forlini)At WWDC 2024, Apple vowed to give its Siri voice assistant a makeover, but it has struggled to deliver on that promise as competitors blow past it, from OpenAI's Voice Mode to Google Gemini Live. Apple has reportedly delayed the release timeline multiple times—first from 2025 to 2026 and then to 2027. At the same time, class-action lawsuits piled up over claims of false advertising for Apple Intelligence and the new Siri.
In March, CEO Tim Cook reassigned the project to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. He promptly instructed the team to explore using third-party models for the new Siri, according to Bloomberg. They looked at Anthropic's Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Meanwhile, Apple internally discussed purchasing Perplexity for its AI tech and talent.
Earlier this month, Apple execs said Siri is on track for a 2026 release, though time will tell. "We don’t want to disappoint customers," says Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak. "We never do but it would have been disappointing to ship something that didn’t hit our quality standard that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable."
Meta seems to be in a similar mode of AI desperation, offering $100 million pay packages to poach top talent from other companies, The Wall Street Journal reports. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a Superintelligence lab, and convinced four top researchers to leave OpenAI for it, Wired reports. OpenAI now says it's "recalibrating" compensation, and is shutting down for a week to give employees a break from the 80-hour workweeks.
Zuckerberg is personally reaching out to "hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars, and entrepreneurs," according to the Journal. Some people claimed they didn't believe it was actually him. He even tried to recruit OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and Bill Peebles, the co-creator of OpenAI’s Sora video generator, but neither accepted the offer.