Craig Federighi’s leadership has already resulted in this major Siri pivot, per report

New Apple privacy features | Craig Federighi on stage at WWDC 2023

Today a revealing new look into Apple’s recent Siri struggles was published at The Information. That report contains myriad details on internal drama and conflicts, but it also ends with a big piece of news: under Craig Federighi’s leadership, for the first time Apple engineers can now use third-party LLMs to build Siri features.

Federighi’s engineers can now use third-party LLMs for Siri features

Wayne Ma writes at The Information:

Federighi has already shaken things up. In a departure from previous policy, he has instructed Siri’s machine-learning engineers to do whatever it takes to build the best AI features, even if it means using open-source models from other companies in its software products as opposed to Apple’s own models, according to a person familiar with the matter.

According to the report, until the recent Siri leadership changes, Apple engineers could only use third-party LLMs to benchmark them against their own in-house models during testing.

For additional context, engineers apparently did a lot of experimentation with OpenAI’s models but were restricted from actually using them in shipping features.

Ma writes: “Apple managers told their engineers in 2023 they couldn’t include models from outside companies in final Apple products.”

Building these models was mostly the responsibility of Giannandrea’s team. This frustrated members of the software group who wanted to build AI-powered features but found that Apple’s models “didn’t perform nearly as well as OpenAI’s technology.”

Now, under Federighi’s leadership, it seems that all open-source LLMs are on the table for Apple’s engineers.

This seems like a great move for users, who only care about getting the best Siri features possible—not so much the underlying technology that’s powering those features.

There are a lot more details in the full The Information report, a variety of which you can find here.

What do you think about this Siri pivot for Apple? Let us know in the comments.