Apple Invents the Search Engine (Again), Calls It “World Knowledge Answers”... (Sounds Legit)

Everyone: So it’s just cat sh*t wrapped in dog sh*t?” 

Tim Cook: Exactly No…

Well, forget iPhones and Vision Pro… Apple’s new moonshot is something called World Knowledge Answers. If that sounds like the default title of an AI-generated Substack peddling crypto scams, that’s because it does. But inside the mothership, it’s being sold as the next evolution of Siri and maybe even Safari.

(Source: Imgflip) 

In short, the pitch for WKA is supposed to supercharge Siri, (which we all know has been stuck in 2011 purgatory) and maybe even crawl into Safari and Spotlight. It’ll “summarize” the web, pull in text, video, photos, and points of interest, and (in theory) make Siri something other than a punchline. That is, if Apple actually ships the damn thing. Siri’s long-promised overhaul has been delayed more times than GTA 6 and Elon’s robotaxi promises combined, and the new roadmap pegs March 2026 as the target for rollout.

(Source: Bloomberg) 

Under the hood though, Apple is leaning on Google of all people. Yes, the same Google that pays Cupertino $20 big ones a year just to stay as the GOAT of search engines on iPhones. However, Apple is now quietly testing a custom Gemini model to power WKA’s summarizer, while still flirting with Anthropic’s Claude and patching together its own “Foundation Models” for device-side search. Translation: Apple wants AI clout but doesn’t want to foot Anthropic’s $1.5B annual price tag, so Google slid in with a sweetheart deal.

As you can imagine, fell head over heels on the headline. Apple stock popped nearly 4% to $238… it's biggest one-day jump in a month on the mere whiff of “Apple + AI” in a sentence. Never mind that revenue from Google’s default search deal still dwarfs whatever Tim Apple is cooking up there, that half the engineers working on Apple’s AI stack are quitting for fat checks at Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And yet, the perception was enough to juice the tape. 

(Source: Giphy) 

In reality though, is that the backdrop screams Apple has been flailing in AI while rivals hoard mindshare. OpenAI dominates chat. Google is stuffing Gemini into everything. Anthropic is selling itself like it’s the new Switzerland of alignment. Meanwhile, Apple is busy rebranding Siri as “LLM Siri” and hoping no one notices that its own Foundation Models team just lost its leader to Zuckerberg in a $200M talent raid. That exodus is so bad Apple’s basically stapling M&A feelers onto every AI startup from Perplexity to Mistral just to stop the bleeding.

Now with that said, Tuesday’s court ruling kept Apple’s $20B-a-year Google search arrangement alive. That means there’s zero financial urgency to roll out WKA. But because “AI” is the only acronym that still moves stock prices, Tim Cook & Co. need to show they’re doing something. So instead of selling you a Vision Pro nobody asked for, they’re promising Siri 2.0, powered by an “answer engine” that already sounds like the name of a defunct Bing feature (gross). 

(Source: Giphy)

So yeah, Apple’s cooking up World Knowledge Answers. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it’ll flop. But for now, the market heard “AI,” saw the ticker, and hit “buy.” And that’s the exact dopamine hit Tim Cook needed. Until next time, friends…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Apple, Google, and Meta as mentioned in the article.