Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg in his Power On newsletter:

Earlier this year, Apple quietly formed a new team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. This group, I’m told, is exploring a number of in-house AI services with the goal of creating a new ChatGPT-like search experience.

The AKI team is led by Robby Walker, a senior director reporting to AI chief John Giannandrea. Walker previously oversaw Siri but lost control of it after engineering delays. Following that shake-up, he was assigned the new Answers initiative, and has brought along several key team members from his Siri days.

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. 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…

Several listings specifically mention experience with search algorithms and engine development. A finished product may still be far off, but the direction is now unmistakable: Something akin to a stripped-down, Apple-built approach to ChatGPT-like search is coming.

Earlier this year, I said that any virtual assistant must have three modalities: search, app actions, and system actions. App actions are what the artificial intelligence industry nowadays calls “agents,” which is to say, computers that interface with other computers. Apple still says it has this part of the stack under control with its “more personalized Siri,” reportedly coming a decade after the apocalypse devours us all, but the more pressing concern is Siri’s search capabilities. Gurman is unclear here, but my reading of this is that the AKI team isn’t building a Google competitor in the traditional sense, but rather a ChatGPT competitor that would take the place of Spotlight and Siri’s current search features.

If you ask your iPhone what the atomic weight of helium is, either via Spotlight, Safari’s Smart Search field, or Siri, you’ll get a snippet that tells you the answer and provides an image on the side. That’s Spotlight’s search crawler in action and is labeled “Siri Knowledge” in Safari. Clicking on the result takes you to Wikipedia in this case, but Siri uses a variety of sources, some less reputable than others. I assume the AKI team is developing a large language model-powered version of that search engine to build into Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, perhaps with a new Apple Intelligence brand name. Gurman reported a few months ago that Apple thought about acquiring Perplexity to integrate its search apparatus within Siri, but the AKI team could do that in-house.

The only reason I was a proponent of the Perplexity acquisition was that Apple doesn’t appear to have any sense of urgency. The AI industry moves at an uncannily fast pace — Grok 4 was the most powerful model last month, and GPT-5 will likely surpass it this month — and Apple’s models significantly lag behind the competition. Its ChatGPT integration is arguably worthless at a time when an AI-powered fallback is sorely needed. Perplexity’s go-getter vigor — the kind you’d expect to see at a Silicon Valley start-up — is what Apple needs to catch up and maintain any modicum of relevancy. I still think the AKI team is too late, but if they make a good search competitor to ChatGPT and ship the App Intents-powered Siri by iOS 27, Apple could still have a chance. Search, agents, and system actions — the three essential modalities to any AI-powered virtual assistant. It’s not the models, it’s the experiences any given company makes with those models.