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Apple’s New “Answers” Team Builds a ChatGPT Rival Here’s What You Need to Know

3 min read
Apple’s New AKI (Answers, Knowledge and Information)
Apple’s New AKI (Answers, Knowledge and Information)

Apple Quietly Builds a ChatGPT-Style Answer Engine

Apple has just formed a new internal team called “Answers, Knowledge and Information” (AKI), tasked with developing a web-based AI “answer engine” that rivals ChatGPT. Led by former Siri executive Robby Walker and reporting to Apple’s AI Chief John Giannandrea, the AKI team signifies Apple’s renewed commitment to generative AI and advanced search experiences.

The goal is to revamp how users access information both in standalone environments (an “Answers” app) and embedded into Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. This marks a pivot from Apple’s previous reluctance toward chatbot-style tools The Economic Times.

Why It Matters: Apple's AI Comeback in Motion

Apple had previously avoided building its own chatbot, choosing instead to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Siri. But industry lag and user expectations have accelerated internal development. CEO Tim Cook recently emphasized that AI may be more transformative than the smartphone, and hinted at ambitious patent acquisition plans The Verge.

At WWDC 2025, the newly named Apple Intelligence emerged as a core AI platform across iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Tahoe but its conversational edge (i.e., Siri upgrade) was delayed yet again. Now, the AKI initiative looks designed to accelerate Apple into modern AI relevancy.

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Also See: Apple AKI Answers vs Google Gemini

What Is Apple Intelligence Today?

Apple Intelligence is a hybrid AI platform that runs both on-device and via Apple’s private cloud infrastructure. The on-device model is lightweight yet sophisticated, while the cloud-based model rivals GPT-4 in performance all built on Apple Silicon and encrypted across endpoints Wikipedia.

Apple aims to retain its signature focus on privacy by processing sensitive tasks without exposing user data to third-party servers. This new AKI answer engine is expected to integrate into Apple Intelligence, offering public-grade answer retrieval while preserving human-level trust in the ecosystem Wikipedia es.wikipedia.org.

1. Conversational Answers

Rather than link-based results, AKI is expected to provide direct replies in natural language, powered by web indexation and AI synthesis.

2. Deep Siri & Spotlight Integration

Instead of a passive assistant, Siri may soon deliver intelligent responses, reasoning over documents and summarizing longer articles or context.

3. Native Support in Safari

Imagine selecting text in Safari and triggering AKI to produce immediate summaries or deeper context all integrated seamlessly within the browser.

Apple has reportedly even considered launching a standalone app for these capabilities, beyond its system-level ecosystem.

What Challenges Does Apple Face?

  1. Talent retention
    Apple lost its fourth core AI researcher to Meta in a single month, raising concerns about internal churn conditions
  2. Privacy tradeoffs
    Even Apple’s default AI stack promises privacy, but moving to web-indexed answers presents risks. AKI must uphold user trust while scaling AI search.
  3. Competitor momentum
    OpenAI, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot Apple is behind, and the AI arms race waits for no one. AKI marks Apple’s repositioning, not the end of its catch-up journey KnowTechie Wccftech.

What This Means for Professionals

If you're a developer, product lead, or AI consultant, this pivot offers clear opportunities and considerations:

  • Search-based apps may need to integrate with Apple's answer engine once APIs are available.
  • Access control structures should be refactored to adapt conversational results rather than paged results.
  • Compliance and audit-heavy environments will demand traceability of AI-sourced answers.

At Scalevise, we’re gearing up workflow automation to support Apple Intelligence ensuring automation, privacy, and scalability are top priorities.

Key Takeaways And Why This Matters Now

Topic What It Means
Apple AI Strategy AKI signals a strategic pivot from phone hardware to intelligence-first software
User Experience AI-powered answers embedded in device search replaces traditional UIs
Developer Impact Soon, apps may query AKI directly for smarter content and assistive AI
Privacy Safeguards Use of foundation models + new answer generation demands trust-by-design workflows

TL;DR

Apple has quietly formed the AKI (Answers, Knowledge and Information) team to create a ChatGPT-style answer engine. This new AI system aims to integrate with Siri, Spotlight, and even Safari, delivering natural-language responses using web knowledge all under Apple’s hardware-enhanced privacy umbrella. With internal delays mounting and competitor momentum rising, AKI may be Apple’s turning point.

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