Apple Builds a ChatGPT-Like App to Help Test the Revamped Siri (www.bloomberg.com)

According to reports, Apple has built an internal ChatGPT‑like app to help test and refine a revamped Siri, giving engineers and contractors a conversational interface to probe, train and red‑team the assistant. The tool mimics modern chatbots so staff can evaluate how large language models handle follow‑up questions, context, instructions and safety filters, collect annotations for supervised fine‑tuning or reinforcement‑learning‑from‑human‑feedback (RLHF), and iterate on prompt engineering and guardrails before wider deployment. This is significant because it signals Apple stepping up investment in generative AI and conversational interfaces while trying to preserve its privacy and integration priorities. Technically, the effort likely involves model orchestration (cloud-hosted and/or on‑device components), fine‑tuning workflows, human annotation pipelines, safety classification layers and latency/compute optimization (distillation, quantization) to meet device constraints. For the AI/ML community, Apple’s approach could push innovations in privacy‑preserving model design, evaluation metrics for assistant behavior, and deployment practices across constrained hardware — and will intensify competition and standards-setting among firms building consumer-facing conversational AI.