According to recent reports, earlier this year Apple quietly formed a new team called “Answers, Knowledge and Innovation”. The team is exploring a number of self-study AI services aimed at creating a new type of ChatGPT search experience. This move marked a strategic shift for Apple in the AI area and sought to enhance its competitiveness in the search and intelligence assistant areas through self-study techniques.
The team was led by the former Siri Core Leader, Robbie Walker, and reported to AppleAi Manager, John Giannandrea. Currently, the team is building the Answer Engine, a system that captures web pages to respond to common knowledge questions. At the same time, they are exploring the development of an independent application and the construction of a new back-end infrastructure to provide search functions for future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.
The establishment of the AKI team shows that apples are no longer entirely dependent on external partners, but are planning to develop autonomous AI solutions. The report states that the team is led by senior AI experts and that the goal is to provide a conversational response similar to ChatGPT through web-based data crawling. However, the plan is still in its early stages, and concrete results and timelines are yet to be defined.
Apples may be driven by market competition and user demand, especially as generating AI (e.g. ChatGPT and Google Gemini) becomes available globally. However, given its consistent emphasis on privacy and user experience, its AI products may focus more on local processing and data security, which differs from cloud-dependent competitors. There have been doubts within apples about chat robotics, but the establishment of AKI shows its determination to catch up with the AI boom.
Apple’s importance to the project has been demonstrated by the fact that several job announcements have been posted on the official Apple website, hiring engineers to build search algorithms and information search engines. This is intended to address the current lack of search functionality for Apple Intelligence, the instability of Siri ‘ s performance, the risks associated with Apple and Google ‘ s search protocols, and the generation of AI to change the search market pattern.
