What the new AI-powered Siri really means for Apple — and for OpenAI

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is stepping down from his role, announced a long-awaited AI update for Siri at the company's annual developer conference.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• Two years ago, Apple announced it was getting into the AI game, with a big new Siri update.
• That update never showed up. Now it's finally here.
• The Verge's Nilay Patel says the new Siri tells you a lot about the way Apple views AI — and its relationship with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

In 2024, Apple said it had created its own take on AI. It would be integrated into Siri, the iPhone virtual assistant that has never really delivered on its promise.

Then Apple found itself unable to deliver the new Siri.

Now this week, at its annual developers conference, Apple said the new, AI-powered Siri is actually ready, and iPhone users will finally see it this fall.

The new Siri isn't meant to compete with the most sophisticated versions of AI engines like ChatGPT or Claude. And it's not going to help you vibe-code a new business.

But the announcement is still significant, says The Verge's Nilay Patel. He thinks that for many people, the new Siri will be an effective replacement for the free version of ChatGPT — the AI engine Apple partnered with back in 2024. And he thinks it's a sign of where Apple is headed, where phones could get swapped out for some other kind of AI-powered device.

Patel and I talked about that and much more — including the prospects for Apple CEO-to-be John Ternus, and why Patel thinks so many AI leaders don't understand how actual humans spend their time — on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation:

Peter Kafka: What's most important about the AI announcements Apple made this week?

Nilay Patel: The sum total of what they've announced is a replacement for the free tier of ChatGPT.

You know this term, Sherlocking? Apple developers love this term. There was this app called Watson a long time ago. It was a search tool, and Apple built a thing called Sherlock and just destroyed it.

Every year, Apple does this in their operating systems. They look around the ecosystem of cool third-party apps, and they just build it as a feature. And here what they have just nakedly done is Sherlock the free version of ChatGPT.

Fundamentally, the announcements add up to "why on earth would you use free ChatGPT when Siri is right here behind a button on your phone, and it can do all the same stuff?"

Two years ago, Apple's approach to AI seemed to be: "We don't make our own AI models, but we'll let you use everyone else's." That seemed to make some sense. What changed?

Two years ago, we were in an entirely different AI paradigm, and I think Apple's approach mirrored their approach to everything, which is "let's see how this plays out and we'll make a great product out of it." What happened instead was the models got ever more capable and the product turned out to be writing code for you.

There isn't another great consumer AI product, at least as far as I can tell. There are the chatbots, and you can go ask the chatbots to do a bunch of stuff. But there's not some great AI pendant that is a threat to the iPhone, right? That thing has not yet emerged.

Which is why I thought Apple didn't want to make its own chatbot — it would let everyone else kill themselves to make the best models and bots, and you'd use your iPhone to use them.

Right. The problem in the long run is all of those chatbots will start doing things for you in the cloud, and will disintermediate the app model, and could disintermediate Apple services revenue, which is their big line of revenue. It drives their whole business. So if you can talk to a bunch of cloud services, which can get you the Uber and place your DoorDash order and shop for you, none of that stuff is happening on your phone.

But you're using your phone. I know everyone wants to develop glasses and pendants, but right now it's the phone. The phone remains undefeated.

I use Gmail on my iPhone, I use Google Maps instead of Apple Maps, I use Spotify instead of Apple Music. Apple would prefer if I use their homegrown versions of those things. But they also don't care, because I bought a $1,000 phone from them last year and I'll buy another one some number of years from now. I get that one day they could be usurped by something else, but as long as there's a device involved.

What they can't do is assume the phone will hold for another 10 or 15 years. And so I think next year the phone holds, and the year after that. But if you believe that user interface paradigm shifts are what leads to new hardware — the scroll wheel brought us the iPod, the multi-touch screen brought us the iPhone — then if you can just talk to an agent and it can go get things done for you, that leads you to any number of hardware form factors, one of which Jony Ive is attempting to build at OpenAI.

The industry is mounting the threat and Apple needs to respond, and I think this version of Apple Intelligence is very much, "We have to at least protect 'you can talk to the phone.'" Because if you're not using Siri, you might use ChatGPT, and if you use ChatGPT enough or Gemini enough, then when they have the hardware, they can say, "You're not even using the rest of this phone. Buy a point-and-shoot camera and our little pendant, and you'll be set, and you won't have social media to distract your kids."

The iPhone's new AI-powered Siri could be a game changer.

Apple

I use ChatGPT all the time. I use the paid version because my employer is a partner with OpenAI, so they pay the fee. Will I use Chat as much next fall, when the new software rolls onto my iPhone, or will I swap it out for Apple's?

If you're on the paid versions of these tools, I don't think Siri is gonna be all that compelling for you outside of the fact that it has better access to your iMessages on your phone. Or if you are an Apple Photos user, it has better access to the index of photos on your phone. Its understanding of the content in Apple's ecosystem is much better than it was before. It's much faster than it was before.

So I think what you're going to see is that talking to Siri about things inside the Apple ecosystem will become vastly more compelling than talking to the other chatbots about things in the Apple ecosystem. "Hey, someone texted me this. Can you find it?" You'll use Siri for that.

Everything else, where you have these long-running agentic tasks or "do deep research for me because I'm on the paid tier of ChatGPT or the paid tier of Gemini" — Apple's nowhere close to that.

Two years ago, OpenAI was Apple's chosen partner, and now Apple seems to be competing with them, and now OpenAI is considering suing Apple. What does that tell us about Apple or OpenAI?

OpenAI is just a vastly more chaotic company with its own interests. They also had just had a messy breakup with Microsoft. They want to be the big consumer company of the next generation. They are building their own products.

They are trying to do everything all at once without any particular focus. If you are a big enterprise customer of OpenAI, I think you're looking around and wondering, "Is this company even going to survive to its IPO? Is Sam Altman going to be CEO forever? Is the next set of executives gonna get fired tomorrow?"

Is this more about Apple saying "we'd like more control over AI" or Apple saying "we'd like to work less with OpenAI?"

This is Apple's DNA, and the part of Apple's DNA that I think is most important here is called the Cook Doctrine, where he said to shareholders many years ago, "We want to own and control the primary technologies that we base our products on."

In this case, they don't own Gemini, and maybe they're not going to make that investment. But they own private cloud compute. They own the code that's running on those servers in Google Cloud. They own the Nvidia GPUs and how they're being used for this stuff.

And I think OpenAI ultimately wants to be a competitor to Apple, versus the frenemy relationship Apple has with Google.

I don't think OpenAI is a big enough or old enough or sophisticated enough company to have that frenemy relationship yet. All the other Big Tech players have these frenemy relationships. Apple and Meta hate each other. Their executives are always taking shots at each other. But there's no Instagram without the iPhone, and there's no iPhone without Instagram, and they know it. And so they keep a distance that is very important.

I think some of these other companies want to be very big, but they just haven't developed the skill set or experience or thick enough skin to pull it off

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Contributer : Business Insider https://ift.tt/WxV9mTf

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