OpenAI Outshines Apple

Here at The Information we’ve written a lot over the past six years about Apple’s struggles to make technological progress with its Siri voice assistant. So it must have been painful to the folks at Apple’s giant donut in Cupertino, Calif., to see OpenAI waltz right onto their turf earlier today and show the kind of artificial intelligence–powered assistant Siri should have been. 

As demos go, OpenAI’s showcase of its latest AI model, GPT-4o, during a livestreamed event was a home run. Executives showed off an impressive series of new capabilities in its ChatGPT chatbot, including a voice assistant that made up a bedtime story and then responded to verbal commands ordering it to narrate the story more dramatically and in a singing voice. (Stephanie Palazzolo reported on Friday that some of these changes were coming.)