Apple used the opening keynote of its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday to show off a substantially rebuilt Siri, the centerpiece of a long-awaited push to catch up in artificial intelligence after two years of stumbles. The redesigned assistant can hold back-and-forth conversations, work through an in-depth plan, brainstorm creative ideas and offer feedback on a document, a marked departure from the command-and-response Siri users have known for more than a decade.
At the heart of the upgrade is a new cloud model Apple called AFM Cloud Pro, which executives said is comparable to Google's Gemini frontier models. In a notable shift for a company that has built its brand on on-device processing, Apple said the model will run in the cloud on Nvidia GPUs, extending its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure onto Nvidia chips hosted in Google's cloud while, it insisted, preserving its privacy guarantees.
Apple described an architecture in which a "system orchestrator" routes each query to the most appropriate model, either on the device or in the cloud, depending on how much computing power and personal data the request requires. The orchestrator, executives said, is "key to the privacy architecture of our entire system," determining what stays on the iPhone and what is sent to Apple's servers.
The keynote also brought changes to the Liquid Glass interface Apple introduced last year, the next generation of its operating systems including iOS 27, and expanded child-safety tools. Together the announcements amounted to Apple's most assertive attempt yet to convince developers and consumers that its AI strategy has found its footing.
Monday's event carried added weight as Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as chief executive. Cook, who has led Apple since 2011, will take the role of executive chairman on Sept. 1 and hand the top job to John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering whom Apple named as his successor on April 20. Cook closed the keynote with a brief, personal message to the audience.
The transition marks the end of an era for a company Cook helped grow into one of the world's most valuable corporations. For Ternus, the hardware chief who has overseen the iPhone, iPad and Mac lines, the AI overhaul unveiled on Monday will define the early agenda of his tenure as Apple races to keep pace with rivals investing heavily in generative AI.