Siri’s Second Act

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**Rolfe Winkler** (0:11)
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**Imani Moise** (0:19)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, June 5th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Apple's preparing to unveil a new Siri, but will it be enough to catch up in the race for AI dominance? We're breaking down the company's latest strategy ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference next week and whether investors will buy it. Then, an AI model has solved a math problem that's puzzled some of the world's brightest minds for 80 years. We'll dive into why the breakthrough has some experts rethinking what AI is capable of.
But first, for decades, Apple has been synonymous with innovation in Silicon Valley. But when it comes to AI, the company is starting to look old school. While rivals like Google and challengers like OpenAI have spent the past few years racing to build smarter chatbots and AI assistants, Siri has become something of a punchline. Uh-huh. Nobody was talking to you, Siri.
But that may be about to change. Apple is making the case that their chatbot can change the way consumers interact with AI.
Kind of like how the iPhone changed how we interact with the Internet. We'll get a clearer picture of that strategy on Monday during the WWDC keynote, where Apple is expected to introduce a new version of Siri built on top of Google's Gemini AI model. WSJ Apple reporter Rolfe Winkler joins me now to explain. Apple is behind in this AI arms race, but the company says it still has a path forward to winning in the AI space. How is that possible?

**Rolfe Winkler** (1:51)
That's what's fascinating about this. As far behind as Apple is in AI, there's an argument that is made by Wall Street analysts, by some people who've left Apple. Why? Because we all still use iPhones. If OpenAI wants to reach people with ChatGPT, it has to go through Apple.
All of these companies long-term still today have to go through Apple.
As dumb as Siri is, has been the last couple of years. Has anyone traded in their iPhone for an Android? Because it's got some better AI features that Google has come out with. There's certainly no mass defections. So if Apple can finally create a Siri that is your guide to this AI world, this could flip.

**Imani Moise** (2:39)
If you have an iPhone, Apple probably knows a lot about you. Having an AI agent that can access all of the personal information in your phone probably sounds exciting to some people and horrifying to others.
How does that feature mesh with Apple's stance on data privacy?

**Rolfe Winkler** (2:53)
Well, this is where it may be an advantage and a handicap. The advantage is Apple is known for its stance on privacy. It's not selling your information to advertisers, for instance, the way Google and Facebook do. That's not Apple's business model. In fact, privacy is something they take so seriously internally. It can hamstring some of their engineers who need data to train AI models. The information you have, you're sharing with your iPhone and only with your iPhone, and even Apple doesn't see it.
So it's an advantage for Apple because they have this trust with their consumers already.
We already give all our information to the iPhone. What if it could use all these things on the device without sending it to the cloud in a way that brings AI to us? A smartphone becomes your smart assistant in a way that it isn't yet, but as I mentioned, it cuts both ways because to train models to make good AI, you need data and Apple doesn't have as much as you think it might because it doesn't see a lot of the data that it has. So this is a perpetual struggle.

**Imani Moise** (4:02)
If AI agents become the primary way people interact with apps, how does that change the economics of smartphones?

**Rolfe Winkler** (4:08)
Apple has become a toll booth for the online world.
When you want to download an app and sign up for a subscription, Apple takes a cut.
When you do a search in the Safari browser, Apple gets a ton of money from Google. The point is, Apple has the consumers. They use its device, which means if you want to reach them, you got to go through Apple and they take their cut. Now in an AI-powered world, if we abstract the apps away, if what the smartphone is is just the chatbot or if it's somebody we're just talking to and we say, hey Siri, book me a car going home. Maybe you're not opening the Uber app, but you're certainly using the Uber service. Uber is going to have to pay to reach those customers in a different way, potentially. So you can see how if they re-engineer Siri, if it is the smart assistant that basically is the on-ramp to this AI-enabled world, Apple will be the toll collector at the front of that on-ramp and could make quite a bit of money.