Apple is hiring engineers for an "Answers, Knowledge, and Information" team that is working on improving Siri, Spotlight, Safari, and more.
As of writing, Apple's careers website has more than a dozen job listings for the team across the U.S. and China. For example, Apple is looking to hire a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help with "improving Siri's ability to answer personal domain questions." The job listing says the team develops large language models that are "responsible for answering users' questions using their personal documents with privacy at the forefront."
That sounds a lot like Apple's personalized Siri features, which were delayed until 2026. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says there is more at play here.
In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said he was told that the team is in the early stages of developing a "new ChatGPT-like search experience," and it is apparently even exploring a "standalone app" for such functionality.
"While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an 'answer engine' — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions," wrote Gurman. "A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari."
Gurman previously reported that Apple was developing a more conversational version of Siri, but he said that it was delayed until at least iOS 27. This would be a more ChatGPT-like version of Siri that is powered by a large language model.
For now, the only thing that Apple has announced is the more personalized version of Siri, which will have better understanding of a user's personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother's flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps. Evidently, though, it looks like Apple has even bigger ChatGPT-like ambitions.
