The Unsolved Puzzle of Apple Computer's "AI" Misadventures Over the Past Year
Not that I have any answers. But I do have lots of questions. And there are interesting tidbits of information out there, as we contemplate the inability of Apple Computer’s Siri to make any significant progress at threading the labyrinth of “AI”. Is there more to the story than secrecy, institutional sclerosis, & managerial overconfidence resulting in missed deadlines, internal confusion, & top executives depriving themselves of situational awareness?…
I do not know whether Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett’s source here thinks he is making Apple Computer’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi look good or is knifing him in the back here:
Mark Gurman & Drake Bennett: Why Apple Still Hasn’t Cracked AI <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-18/how-apple-intelligence-and-siri-ai-went-so-wrong>: For the Siri upgrade, Apple was targeting April 2025…. But when Federighi started running a beta of the iOS version, 18.4, on his own phone weeks before the operating system’s planned release, he was shocked to find that many of the features Apple had been touting—including pulling up a driver’s license number with a voice search—didn’t actually work…. (The WWDC demos were videos of an early prototype, portraying what the company thought the system would be able to consistently achieve.) The planned rollout was delayed until May and then indefinitely, even as the features were still being promoted on commercials…
In some ways it is worse than Gurman and Bennett said: they do not remind their readers that the vibe from the commercials was not that one of “these features are coming soon” but, rather of “these features of Apple Intelligence are here now!”
And if whoever Gurman and Bennett’s sources are think that they are doing Federighi a favor by portraying him as so lacking in situational awareness that he has to open a newly released beta on his own device in order to learn that tentpole features are not shipping—that V1 is unshippable, and V2 is nowheresville—then I question their sanity.
Given that Apple Computer has been, for nearly a decade, shipping versions of Apple Siri that are far behind the competition and not up to anything one might think of as Apple Computer quality standards, it is hard to see the current Apple Computer party line that “we weren’t able to achieve the reliability in [the New Siri with its V2 architecture] in the time we thought…” as anything other than euphemism.
This is particularly so given that there seems to have been a substantial amount of schizophrenia among Apple’s leadership with respect to AI a year ago. On the one hand, back then they recognized, as Craig Federighi put it to Joanna Stern earlier this week, that “when it comes to automating capabilities on devices in a reliable way, no one’s doing it really well right now…” On the other hand, against this background, Federighi also says “we wanted to be the first. We wanted to do it best…” Moreover, they thought that they could do so. That meant producing, in nine months, without very much of a past runway, and without giving John Giannandrea’s AI team the GPU chips they thought that they needed, a context-aware agent-chain AI system that was beyond the frontier that any of the companies spending much more on the problem had managed to create. Perhaps the key problem is that Apple’s historical strength has been its insistence on “it just works”, reliably. But if we know one thing about generative AI with all its hallucinations, very recalcitrant edge cases, and inability to reliably shift from interpolation to extrapolation, the last thing it can do is “just work.
And here I am of two minds. On the one hand, this would seem crazy without having had truly extraordinary breakthroughs substantially more than a year ago. On the other hand, as John Gruber has written: “Apple’s executives aren’t crazy…” They announced that they could do it at the 2024 WWCD, and, again quoting Gruber:
Multiple trusted sources… [n]ever saw an internal build…[of] this [as of the 2024 WWDC]…. They don’t believe there was one, because… they believe that if there had been such a build, their teams would have had access to it. Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed…. The first any of them ever heard of it was when they watched the keynote with the rest of us on the first day of WWDC last year. [BUT] I’m quite certain Apple’s executives believed…. Crazy to announce… if they didn’t believe they could ship it…
So just how much AI-overpromising did Apple Computer do at its 2024 WWDC keynote? And how did the Apple executives convince themselves that their overpromising was only at the margin? And why?
Lots of questions. I do not have any good answers. I do, however, have some things that strike me as highly informative: