Apple and OpenAI to announce updates, as AI arms race intensifies

As OpenAI preps for a major news conference Monday, Apple is reportedly planning its own announcement on a major boost to Siri, an early voice assistant which has lagged behind other AI chatbots for years.

OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker and generative AI leader whose data collection policies have faced scrutiny for their use of copyrighted material, will unveil new features in a Monday event, per founder Sam Altman.

“[The announcement is] not GPT-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! Feels like magic to me,” Altman, who was fired and quickly reinstated from the non-profit research company last November, said in a post on X.

OpenAI, which has the backing of Microsoft, is reportedly still working on a search feature, which Bloomberg reports will be able to crawl the web and provide sources in results.

On the other side of the San Francisco Bay, Apple plans to completely overhaul the underlying technology beneath Siri, moving to a ChatGPT-like generative language model which can better engage in conversation rather than simple prompting, the New York Times reports.

In Apple’s forthcoming June 10 developers’ event, the company is set to announce the update, a key component of its effort to catch up with competitors in the generative AI space.

Apple’s launch of new chips this week made a splash in the AI world, signaling to investors that it’s becoming serious in the development of chips amidst an “AI arms race,” per the Wall Street Journal. 

Google is similarly hosting a Tuesday event, which will likely spotlight its own chatbot, Gemini. Which has struggled to capture market share from ChatGPT and OpenAI’s embedded generative AI features in Bing.