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Apple may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet but the tech giant has struggled to get its AI initiatives going while rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been taking over the market. It would be an understatement to say that things have not gone as planned for Apple, even though the firm eventually unveiled its artificial intelligence features, called Apple Intelligence, at the WWDC conference last year after a protracted wait. In addition to the months-long delay of its eagerly anticipated Siri redesign, a number of other AI capabilities have been criticised for being imprecise and generally less powerful than those seen on competitors' smartphones, like Samsung's Galaxy series and Google's Pixel.

But Apple CEO Tim Cook isn't in the mood to back down from the AI race. Earlier this month, he allegedly warned his staff that AI might be as huge as the internet and that Apple is in it to win. Soon after, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple is now working on a stripped-down version of ChatGPT with search features. What's intriguing is that Apple has previously denied the necessity for a chatbot, claiming that there is little customer interest in that experience.

Siri can now use ChatGPT to answer complex queries. The firm has already hinted about collaborating with other AI-based search providers, such as Perplexity, to present its consumers with a fresh experience. According to Gurman, Apple is currently working on developing its own chatbot experience for search.

Apple to build ChatGPT like chatbot?

Earlier in the year, Apple reportedly established a new team dubbed Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI, with the intention of developing a search experience similar to ChatGPT. Robby Walker, a senior director at the iPhone manufacturer who answers directly to AI Chief John Giannandrea, is in charge of the group.

After many delays in releasing an AI-powered version of the voice assistant, Walker lost his former responsibilities as the person in charge of monitoring the development of Siri. In addition to Walker, a number of other important Siri team members have joined the AKI team to work on creating a "answer engine." According to the report, the response engine would be a system that can scan the web to provide answers to general knowledge queries, but the project is still in its early phases. Along with the back-end architecture required to support these features in next iterations of Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, a stand-alone application for this new tool is now being investigated.