More details have emerged regarding Apple's plans to dramatically improve Siri by leveraging large language models (LLMs) that will make it more conversational and capable of nuanced reasoning. Meanwhile, Apple's work on a ChatGPT competitor model is also moving forward.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company is internally testing a broad range of models of varying complexity. Versions with 3 billion, 7 billion, 33 billion, and 150 billion parameters are now said to be "in active use."
Like ChatGPT, the 150 billion parameter model relies on the cloud, and its size means it is much more powerful than on-device Apple Intelligence, whose foundational models are 3 billion parameters.
With the help of an internal testing tool called "Playground," Apple has run benchmarks on the model that suggest it "approaches the quality of recent ChatGPT rollouts." However, there are still said to be concerns over its tendency to hallucinate. Meanwhile, "philosophical differences" remain among company executives, though Gurman provided no additional details on what they might be.
A previous report revealed that Apple has AI offices in Zurich, where employees are working on the all-new software architecture for Siri. The model is expected to eventually replace Siri's current "hybrid" architecture that has been incoherently layered up with different functionality.
Gurman reports that Apple is also testing a chatbot model dubbed "Knowledge" internally that can access the internet to gather and synthesize data from multiple sources. Presumably this would become another Siri capability, but the project is said to be led by Robby Walker, who recently saw Siri removed from his command. According to Gurman, employees familiar with the project say the chatbot project has also been dogged by the same problems that delayed the Siri overhaul.
It's still not clear when Apple will implement these technologies, and the company is unlikely to offer launch roadmaps at WWDC this month, given the blowback it received for announcing Apple Intelligence features at last year's conference that still have yet to launch.
In the meantime, Google's Gemini is expected to be added to iOS 26 as an alternative to ChatGPT in Siri, and Apple is also said to be in talks with Perplexity to add their AI service as another option in the future, for both Siri and Safari search.
