Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around being discontent with the currently available alternatives. Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.

"Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?" That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of uncomfortable questions for a control freak company.

Does that sound plausible to anyone else?

So I had to set my Siri language to Japanese, and now I can look up English translations of Japanese words…though I do have to speak Japanese.

Plenty of us are glad. Look at Microsoft and Google tried to force feed users inmature broken LLM tech no one asked for

Some more interesting background:

The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time. They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a default application that people actually like.

One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to their app.

Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.

Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and well as they can.