You read the headline and think it's The Onion, but no. The Information and 9to5mac report that Apple is sending around 200 engineers from the Siri team to multi-week courses on AI-assisted programming.
Yes, the team that's been building a voice assistant in Cupertino for over a decade is going back to school to learn how modern neural networks work.
Why it matters right now
The bootcamp runs exactly two months before WWDC 2026 in June — the conference where Apple promised to show a completely rebuilt Siri. After a year of delays and public failures with "AI features," this is effectively the last chance to catch up with Google and OpenAI on home turf.
What's under the hood
Historically Siri was built on classical NLP (natural language processing). Modern LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude — operate on completely different principles. Apple is force-retraining its own team on new architectures and prompt engineering.
Indirectly this confirms September rumors that Apple is in talks with Google to license Gemini as the base for the new Siri. Which means WWDC could ship a hybrid — Apple's interface on top of someone else's model, while in-house engineers finish re-skilling.