Mark Gurman, at Bloomberg (gift link):
Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the
digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence
chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race
dominated by OpenAI and Google. […]The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining
the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the
coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features
unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen
content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at
searching the web.The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to
the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are
private. The company aims to unveil that technology in June at its
Worldwide Developers Conference and release it in September.Campos, which will have both voice- and typing-based modes, will
be the primary new addition to Apple’s upcoming operating systems.
The company is integrating it into iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, both
code-named Rave, as well as macOS 27, internally known as Fizz.
Apple ought to just go back to calling it “iOS” on both iPhone and iPad, because it’s always been the same system fundamentally. If they really do have the same codename, it sure suggests that Apple’s engineering teams see it that way too.
The reverse course on chatbots is welcome, and I think inevitable. The chat interface is just too useful. One of the most maddening things about Siri is that even when it’s helpful today, even when it gets things right, you can never refer back to previous interactions. I refer back to previous chats in ChatGPT almost every day.
Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering,
said in a June interview with Tom’s Guide that releasing a chatbot
was never the company’s goal. Apple didn’t want to send users “off
into some chat experience in order to get things done,” he said.
I quote this paragraph only to point out that Gurman/Bloomberg could have, but chose not to, link to the interview with Federighi (and Joz) at Tom’s Guide. Every single link in the article goes to another page at bloomberg.com.
The iOS 26.4 update of Siri, the one before the true chatbot, will
rely on a Google-developed system internally known as Apple
Foundation Models version 10. That software will operate at 1.2
trillion parameters, a measure of AI complexity. Campos, however,
will significantly surpass those capabilities. The chatbot will
run a higher-end version of the custom Google model, comparable to
Gemini 3, that’s known internally as Apple Foundation Models
version 11.In a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are
discussing hosting the chatbot directly on Google servers running
powerful chips known as TPUs, or tensor processing units. The more
immediate Siri update, in contrast, will operate on Apple’s own
Private Cloud Compute servers, which rely on high-end Mac chips
for processing.
A policy shift indeed, if that comes to pass.
