Apple reportedly formed a new team to focus on search and develop a ChatGPT competitor

According to a recent article by renowned Apple leaker Mark Gurman, Apple has formed a new team to develop an app similar to ChatGPT.

Gurman revealed that the team, called "Answers, Knowledge, and Information" (AKI), is working on building an "answer engine" that can draw on information from the web to respond to questions.

This could be a standalone app or power search functionality within Siri, Safari, and other Apple products.

Gurman also noted that Apple is recruiting for this team, specifically seeking candidates with experience developing search algorithms and engines.

The Road to AI

When Apple launched its artificial intelligence platform, Apple Intelligence, last year, it made it clear that it would not develop its own chatbot. Instead, it announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the Siri voice assistant, allowing users to access "world knowledge" without relying on Apple's own products.

Since then, Apple's senior software and marketing executives have repeatedly stated that they no longer believe a chatbot is necessary and believe consumer interest is limited. But the reality is that while Apple Intelligence can summarize notifications, rewrite text, generate emojis, and clean up photos, it lacks the conversational AI search experience offered by ChatGPT or Google Gemini. In other words, Apple Intelligence doesn't yet have search capabilities.

Meanwhile, Siri's responses remain frustratingly unreliable. While it can handle some basic queries, it often defers other requests to ChatGPT and simply directs the user to a standard web search.

This lack of search functionality puts Apple at a disadvantage. The company has never developed its own search engine—partly due to an agreement with Google, under which Alphabet pays Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default option on Apple devices.

But this arrangement may soon be disrupted. Apple may be forced to change its search agreement with Google, as it is widely expected that the US Department of Justice will force changes to the agreement, which could result in significant annual losses for Apple. During last week's earnings call, Apple's CFO hinted that the company's services business growth is closely tied to the Google agreement.

This comes at a time when the search landscape is rapidly changing. Thanks to generative AI, people are using tools like ChatGPT for more than just traditional queries. Eddy Cue, head of Apple's services business, noted that AI-based search is the future, and he confirmed that Apple is exploring partnerships to create a more modern search experience, including with startup Perplexity.