Last month Apple experienced a major internal shake-up related to Siri, part of the fallout of its delayed Siri upgrades. An extensive new report at The Information provides the best look yet into the drama happening behind the scenes, and where things stand with Siri now.
Poor leadership behind Apple’s AI struggles
Wayne Ma at The Information has published a detail-packed report outlining how Apple “fumbled Siri’s AI makeover.”
There are a lot of looks into the behind-the-scenes pulse of Apple employees throughout the last couple years of AI and Siri development.
For example, Ma notes that Apple’s struggles in AI seem partly tired to the company’s “militant stance on user privacy,” but just as significant is poor leadership.
Ma writes:
More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine-learning group led by Giannandrea—known as AI/ML for short—told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution. They singled out [Robby] Walker as lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of the voice assistant.
Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture and struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials: AIMLess.
The “AIMLess” nickname says a lot about how many at Apple seem to have perceived its AI team.
Demoing Siri upgrades that hadn’t been built
Apple has gotten a lot of flack for demoing AI features last year at WWDC that seemingly didn’t even have working prototypes.
Ma’s report confirms that suspicion. Regarding Apple’s Siri demo where the assistant is asked about her mom’s flight landing and lunch plans, he writes:
Among members of the Siri team at Apple, though, the demonstration was a surprise. They had never seen working versions of the capabilities, according to a former Apple employee. At the time, the only new feature from the demonstration that was activated for test devices was a pulsing, colorful ribbon that appeared on the edges of the iPhone’s screen when a user invoked Siri, the former employee said.
It’s pretty shocking that Siri’s new design was, per this report at least, the only new feature that was ready for testing within Apple last June.
With that in mind, it’s almost surprising the company was able to even ship the new Siri features that it did in iOS 18.1 and 18.2.
For Apple, the Siri demo was a break from its past practice. Historically, Apple would only show features and products at its conferences that were already working on test devices and that its marketing team had vetted to ensure they could be released on time.
Federighi’s ‘Intelligent Systems’ team
One major theme throughout is that there seems to be much more optimism within Apple that Siri is in good hands now.
Federighi and Rockwell seem to be viewed internally as leaders who get things done, and have strong track records of shipping.
Not only that, Federighi’s software team has apparently built up its own sort of AI division—‘Intelligent Systems’—that’s seen as responsible for many of the Apple Intelligence features that have shipped.
While the AI/ML team continues to operate under Giannandrea, the piece hints that more clashes between Federighi and Giannandrea‘s teams could await.
Also, Ma closes with a fascinating tidbit: Federighi has reportedly already changed one big AI policy.
Whereas Apple engineers previously had been directed to build features only using internal models, now using open-source third-party models has been given the green light.
There’s so much more included in the full report, it’s well worth a read if you subscribe to The Information.
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