Apple is actively hiring for its “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” team, signaling a major expansion of its AI capabilities across Siri, Spotlight, Safari, and beyond. The team’s mission is to build a large language model-powered answer engine that can deliver personalized and general-knowledge responses while prioritizing privacy.
The company has over a dozen job listings related to this initiative across the U.S. and China. Among them is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer role focused on enhancing Siri’s ability to answer questions using personal context. This includes tapping into documents and data from apps like Mail and Messages while preserving on-device privacy. These capabilities align with Apple Intelligence’s vision for more contextual, helpful, and privacy-respecting assistants starting with iOS 18.
However, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, this project goes further than the currently announced personalized Siri. He reports that Apple is also exploring a new ChatGPT-like search experience and even a standalone app powered by what the company internally refers to as an “answer engine.” This system would be capable of web crawling and delivering responses to general-knowledge questions, much like today’s generative AI tools.
Although Apple previously delayed the more conversational, LLM-powered Siri until at least iOS 27, work on the underlying infrastructure has already started. The backend improvements being developed are expected to eventually enhance Siri, Safari, and Spotlight with more intelligent and contextually aware responses.
For now, Apple Intelligence is set to bring improvements like on-screen awareness and per-app actions, enabling use cases such as asking Siri about flight details or reservation times mentioned in emails or messages. But these job postings suggest that Apple’s ambitions are broader, with long-term plans that resemble a hybrid between private AI assistants and general-purpose answer engines.
