As Microsoft, Alphabet – and now Amazon.com – blaze ahead in the race to deploy advanced chatbots like ChatGPT, one rival remains nowhere to be seen. Apple may be biding its time for the technology to mature, as it often does, but waiting too long could put the iPhone maker in a position where it’s hard to catch up.

AI is not new to the Cupertino-based company. Its Siri voice assistant, using speech recognition and machine learning to understand a request and execute a solution, was released 12 years ago. It also bought music-recognition app Shazam and personalised-magazine creator Texture, both of which were incorporated into Apple’s ecosystem. Chief executive Tim Cook told investors in February that AI would be a “major focus” for Apple and cited ways the company was already using it for features like crash detection on the Apple Watch and iPhone.

But the large-language model technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT is different from what Apple offers today. We asked both Siri and ChatGPT to provide a recipe for chocolate cupcakes. Siri’s response was lacklustre and pedestrian: “Here’s what I found on the web,” it said, providing three links from a Google search. ChatGPT was positively enthusiastic: “Certainly! Here’s a recipe for delicious chocolate cupcakes.” The detailed reply was complete with ingredients, portions and methods.

Siri’s responses sound so limited by comparison because it is powered by a command and control system, which is programmed to recognise certain queries like, “What time is it?” ChatGPT sounds more humanlike because it’s powered by a large language model, which is trained to generate text based on huge data sets scraped from the Web.

November’s release of ChatGPT set off alarm bells both at Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, sparking a race to bring their own competing versions to market. Microsoft licensed GPT-3, the language model that powers ChatGPT, while Google introduced Bard. Meta stepped into the fray with a chatbot model called LLaMA in February. Amazon this month launched a service called Bedrock.

It’s very possible that Apple is quietly working behind the scenes on its own entry. A more likely scenario: the company is focused on its upcoming virtual and augmented reality products, which it is expected to launch in June with a long-awaited headset that could cost $US3000 ($4486).

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Apple in the past six months seems to have avoided jumping into the ChatGPT race by continuing to hire specialists in vision-recognition instead of large-language model technology, according to analysis by Glass.ai, which recently scanned the LinkedIn profiles of newly hired AI researchers at large technology firms. Vision recognition is an AI field where computers identify images, and that expertise would dovetail more with Apple’s work on a mixed-reality headset. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.