It may not all be looking well for Apple's AI ambitions
Seven years after
poached Google's AI chief John Giannandrea to revitalize its artificial intelligence efforts, the iPhone maker finds itself increasingly behind competitors in the AI race, with delayed features, internal upheaval, and mounting concerns about its future in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
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The company's flagship AI initiative, Apple Intelligence, was promised to transform
Siri
into a ChatGPT-like assistant but has repeatedly failed to deliver. Features showcased at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain buggy or non-functional, with the upgraded Siri delayed indefinitely after internal testing revealed fundamental problems.
Leadership shuffles amidst internal struggles
Bloomberg reports that John Giannandrea, hired from Google in 2018 to lead Apple's AI transformation, has been stripped of product development control this spring.
CEO
Tim Cook
reportedly lost faith in Giannandrea's execution abilities, transferring Siri development to Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell under software chief Craig Federighi.
"This is a crisis," one senior AI team member told Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett. "It's been sinking for a long time," another team member added, comparing the effort to a foundering ship.
The leadership changes come as Apple faces mounting pressure to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which blindsided the company in 2022.
Internal data described to Bloomberg shows Apple's chatbot technology remains at least 25% less accurate than ChatGPT at handling most queries.
Technical problems plague Siri and Apple Intelligence despite major investment
Apple's technical challenges run deeper than surface-level delays. Engineers report that the company essentially split Siri's infrastructure in half, creating integration issues that have proven difficult to resolve. "There are hundreds of bugs right now," one Siri team member revealed.
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"It's whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up."
The company's conservative approach to acquiring graphics processing units (GPUs) has also backfired, with competitors like Amazon and Microsoft securing much of the world's supply. Apple's commitment to user privacy, while admirable, has further hindered AI development by limiting researchers' access to the vast amounts of data needed to train competitive models.
The future seems uncertain for Apple's AI ambitions
Senior executives worry that Apple's AI struggles threaten its position across multiple product lines. Eddy Cue, Apple's services chief, has warned colleagues that the company risks becoming the Nokia of the smartphone era if it cannot master AI technology.
The company now plans to focus on upgrading existing Apple Intelligence capabilities rather than revolutionary new features for the next iOS version. Sources indicate Apple is preparing to separate its AI branding from Siri, acknowledging the voice assistant's damaged reputation.
Despite the setbacks, some remain optimistic. Original Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus believes Apple still has advantages, noting that "all of the foundational model companies have no idea what an assistant is" while Apple has worked on the concept since 2010.
However, with European regulations potentially forcing Apple to allow third-party voice assistants as defaults, the company faces an unprecedented challenge to its ecosystem control just as AI reshapes how users interact with technology.
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