Report Details Turmoil Behind Siri and Apple’s AI Efforts

Siri has been severely held back by organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information‘s Wayne Ma.

The paywalled report explains that former Apple employees who worked in the company’s AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have held back ‌Siri‌ and Apple’s AI efforts. The virtual assistant is apparently “widely derided” inside Apple for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time.

By 2018, the team working on ‌Siri‌ had apparently “devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant.”

Many Apple employees on these teams purportedly left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, including large-language models. Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals give ‌Siri‌ the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be gimmicky and hard to control. The company’s uncompromising stance on privacy has also proven challenging for enhancing ‌Siri‌, with Apple pushing for more of the virtual assistant’s functions to be performed on-device.

The group working on Apple’s mixed reality headset were reportedly disappointed by the demonstrations provided by the ‌Siri‌ team on how the virtual assistant could control the headset. At one point in the device’s development, the headset team considered building an alternative method for controlling the device using voice commands because ‌Siri‌ was deemed to be unsatisfactory.

The report also notes that engineers who helped Apple modernize its search technology left the company to work on the type of large-language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT at Google. Tim Cooks personally attempted to persuade the team to stay at Apple.

More to follow…