Apple is building a ChatGPT rival

Quick Note

We’re playing catch up after I was away for a few days last week. Today’s headlines dropped over the weekend, and tomorrow we’ll jump back into the latest news.

Apple is building a ChatGPT rival

Apple has reportedly formed a new team dedicated to building a ChatGPT-like app to compete with OpenAI. 

Key background: Apple previously decided to integrate OpenAI’s technology into Siri after in-house AI development experienced delays. 

What’s happening now:

• The new Answers, Knowledge and Information team is building an “answer engine” that responds to questions using information from the web. 

• This will likely resemble competing AI search products like Perplexity and ChatGPT search, which generate direct answers to queries rather than returning a list of links. 

• Bloomberg reports that the model could launch as a standalone app or integrate into other Apple products like Siri and Safari. 

The bigger picture: When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence last year, it promised an upgraded version of Siri powered by LLMs designed to make it more conversational. That feature is still nowhere close to launching after being delayed to spring 2026. This appears to be a last-ditch effort to salvage Siri 2.0 with in-house technology. 

What’s the vision for AI on smartphones?

Phone manufacturers including Apple and Samsung want to make their devices more context-aware¹ and proactive² — meaning they will:

1. Monitor what’s happening on users’ screens and predict what they’re trying to do. 

2. Offer suggestions and even act autonomously in certain scenarios. 

The goal is to turn your smartphone into an assistant that adapts to you, allowing it to do things like manage your calendar or send emails and text messages on its own. Apple’s upcoming Siri upgrade is crucial to making that vision a reality. 

The current version of Siri is limited to scripted commands that enable it to perform basic tasks (ex. setting a timer or alarm). Large language models (LLMs) specialize in language processing, so Apple wants to create an LLM-powered Siri that is better at understanding users’ requests and the content on their screens. This would make interactions with Siri feel much more natural and give it a wider range of capabilities. 

xAI launches Grok Imagine

xAI has launched Grok Imagine, a new AI image and video generator that allows users to create NSFW content. 

Key background: xAI recently dropped Grok companions, which are “3D animated AI personas” that users can build romantic relationships with. 

The details:

• Grok Imagine converts text and image prompts into 15-second video clips featuring native audio. 

• The tool doesn’t match the quality of rivals like Google’s Veo 3 or OpenAI’s Sora, but it generates outputs much more quickly.

• Grok Imagine also has a “spicy mode” that allows users to generate sexually explicit content. Early testers say this feature caps out at semi-nude imagery. 

Why it matters: Elon Musk has an interesting obsession with AI companions and sexual content. xAI’s latest Grok features seem to prove that AI will one day be able to replace human intimacy (at least partially), but it’s hard to imagine any real benefits coming from this tech. 

More trending news

ChatGPT is on track to hit 700 million weekly users 

Google DeepMind says new Genie 3 world model is a step toward AGI

Perplexity is accused of scraping data from websites that explicitly block AI scraping 

Thanks for reading! My goal is to make these emails as easy to read as possible — if there’s anything I can do for you to achieve that goal, let me know!

See you tomorrow,

Chain of Thought