Tech companies Apple and OpenAI are set to announce updates to their respective AI systems today with Siri, a relatively undeveloped voice assistant, getting a major overhaul as the AI arms race intensifies.
While OpenAI readies itself for a major news conference today on Monday, May 13th, Apple is reportedly planning its own announcement on a significant boost to Siri, the early voice assistant that has lagged behind other AI chatbots for some time.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, whose data collection policies have come under scrutiny for their use of copyrighted material, will unveil new features in an event on Monday, as 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’s and Apple’s updates
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is reportedly still working on a search feature, which Bloomberg reports will be able to crawl the web and provide sources in results.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, Apple plans to completely overhaul the underlying technology beneath Siri, progressing to a ChatGPT-like generative language model that can better engage in conversation instead of basic prompting, The New York Times reports.
Apple is set to announce the update in its forthcoming June 10th developers’ events, which marks the company’s attempt to catch up with competitors in the generative AI space. Apple’s launch of new chips this week made waves in the AI world, showing investors that it’s becoming a serious competitor in the development of chips amidst an AI arms race, as per The Wall Street Journal.
Google is also holding an event this week that will likely spotlight its own chatbot, Gemini, a piece of technology that has struggled to capture market share from ChatGPT and OpenAI’s embedded generative AI features in Bing.
In recent months and years, the world of tech giants and AI startups has seen significant growth in competition among the most prominent players in the field. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI are trying their best to gain dominance in the fields of AI chatbots and large language models.
As these life-changing and innovative tools continue to become more advanced and reshape various industries at a rapid pace, the race to develop the best, most advanced and capable AI systems has reached a critical moment. The consequences of this reality are still hard to predict and foresee.
The intense level of competition between all major tech giants in the field of AI is more than likely to have far-reaching consequences for various industries and our societies as a whole in the coming years.