Apple is focusing its first round of AI enhancements on boosting conversational skills in Siri, according to a new report from The New York Times.

Company executives realized early last year that ChatGPT made Siri look outdated.

Apple decided that the big linguistic model principles underlying the OpenAI chatbot could give the iPhone's virtual voice assistant a much-needed opportunity.

Apple plans to launch a new version of Siri powered by generative artificial intelligence during the WWDC conference on June 10.

Apple's vice presidents, Craig Federigi and John Gianandria, tested ChatGPT for weeks before the company realized Siri looked old, leading to the company's most significant reorganization in more than a decade.

The company sees generative AI as a once-in-a-decade opportunity worth spending resources to exploit.

The company canceled the $10 billion Apple Car project earlier this year and rehired several of those engineers to work on generative artificial intelligence.

Apple executives fear that AI models will replace existing systems like iOS, turning the iPhone into a worthless phone by comparison.

The first wave of custom AI tools, such as the Human AI Pin and Rabbit R1, is not useful enough to be a threat, although things may change as the software evolves.

Other smartphone makers are integrating AI into operating systems, and other device makers have an opportunity to innovate.

Apple will not currently launch competing products for generative AI products, such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, or ElevenLabs, but rather start with the new Siri and updated iPhone models capable of handling local processing.

Apple's approach prioritizes privacy and handles requests locally, which means the company starts with a simple approach that commits to improving what's there, as well as maintaining most or all of the processing across the device.

The company's culture of internal confidentiality and privacy-focused marketing have hampered its progress in artificial intelligence.

The company's tendency to isolate the information that different departments share with each other was another major reason why Siri was unable to evolve beyond where the assistant was when the company launched it the day before Steve Jobs died in 2011.

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