Apple employee explaining Siri AI features at WWDC 2024

(Apple / YouTube)

Apple may have just explained how Siri is actually going to become useful

Using on-screen awareness and context from your personal life and app usage, Apple may finally be able to prove AI is more than just a sideshow.

Rebecca Moretti

6/10/24 4:42PM

If you missed Apple's annual developer conference, rest easy knowing that you didn't miss much.

To illustrate this point: one of the most surprising things Apple announced was that it's finally bringing the calculator app to iPad.

And then there are the AI integrations (though Apple impressively managed to avoid saying "AI" for most of the conference).

Apple's bringing "Apple Intelligence" features to iOS 18. Basically, these will allow you to use genAI across apps. Picture: generative rewrites of your emails, text-to-image generation, and summaries of group chats. Perhaps less useful: the ability to create custom AI emojis ("Genmojis").

Siri's getting an AI makeover: The OG voice assistant will supposedly be smarter (oddly, Apple chose to demonstrate this by asking it to pull up the weather). Notably, Siri will be able to pull info from different apps (messages, mail, maps, search, etc.) to better answer questions and cross-reference. For example, you could ask: "Will I make it in time to pick up mom from the airport?" and it would find the message with your mother's flight details and check the flight status + commute time to inform its answer. Partially this will work because Apple is focusing on “personal context awareness” and “on-screen awareness,” which is able to access contacts and apps on your phone that are already filled with your personalized content. Apple says it will also let third-party app-makers tap into this functionality.

Oh, and you'll also be able to type your requests to Siri (so you don't have to embarrass yourself in public).

OpenAI partnership, confirmed: As expected, Apple said it's partnering with OpenAI to infuse ChatGPT into its AI features (both Siri and other apps). If you ask Siri a question and it thinks CGPT is better suited to answer, it'll ask you if it's okay to share your query with CGPT (seems like this could happen a lot?).

Our take: Outsourcing AI is a smart move. Companies have been sinking billions into AI with no way of knowing when (or if) it’ll pay off. Apple also left the door open to integrating other AI services beyond OpenAI at a later date, keeping the company from getting locked into a single provider. By outsourcing some of its AI to ChatGPT, Apple can stay focused on the thing that’s kept it one of the world’s most valuable companies (hardware) without sinking billions into Nvidia chips.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5