What just happened, in three sentences
Apple held its annual WWDC developer conference June 8–12, and it delivered something nobody expected it to pull off: a genuinely competitive AI assistant, rebuilt from the ground up with Google’s Gemini under the hood. At the same time, Apple opened the iPhone to rival AI models for the first time — you can now set Claude or ChatGPT as your default AI instead of Siri. And in the background, a brand-new developer framework called Core AI means your iPhone can run full AI models locally, without sending anything to the cloud.
That’s three massive shifts happening at once. And the ripple effects — for every app on your phone, every developer building software, and every company selling AI — are just beginning to land.
“Apple is done playing catch-up with AI. This is the biggest software moment for the company since the App Store.”
How Siri got a brain transplant
Let’s be honest: Siri has been a running joke for years. While ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini were having real conversations, booking restaurants, and writing code, Siri was still misunderstanding ‘Call Mum’ and opening the wrong app. Apple knew it. Users knew it. And when CEO Tim Cook walked on stage at Apple Park on June 8 — for the last time, since he’s handing over to hardware chief John Ternus in September — fixing Siri was the whole point.
So what changed?
Everything under the hood. The new Siri — branded simply as ‘Siri AI’ — is powered by a custom version of Google’s Gemini, a 1.2-trillion-parameter AI model that Apple pays Google roughly $1 billion a year to access. This is the same underlying technology that powers Google’s own assistant, except Apple has tuned it specifically for its devices.
The practical difference is dramatic. Old Siri could barely remember what you said two sentences ago. New Siri can handle multi-step requests in one breath — ‘Check the weather in Kuala Lumpur this weekend, put Saturday’s forecast in a note, and share it with Iman’ — and actually complete all three steps. It can also see what’s on your screen and act on it, something competitors have done for a year but Apple is only now matching.