Despite Apple’s rapid evolution in AI, the company has struggled to be part of the AI race with its competitors like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, according to the Bloomberg Big Take podcast titled ‘Apple has an AI Problem’.
Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, has not delivered the company’s promised features. Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman pointed out that the company advertised overhauling its voice assistant, but these features are still malfunctioning. He said there is a “complete disconnect between Apple Engineering and Apple Marketing”.
Subsequently, Apple took the Siri ad down, which led to customers filing lawsuits for false advertising of the product.
Gurman has previously reported that Apple is developing a project it refers to internally as ‘LLM Siri’, a revamped and generative AI iteration of the company’s digital assistant. However, the company’s earlier strategy of combining the assistant with the current Siri has proven ineffective.
The Bloomberg report also mentioned that Apple offers writing tools to summarise text and synthesise text into bullet points, but the generative AI to create something uses tools like OpenAI and ChatGPT, which happen to be integrated into iOS 18.
“What we have today is a far cry from the vision Apple presented. And it’s an even farther cry from what you’re seeing from competitors,” Gurman said in the podcast.
“Apple needs to get a lot faster. They need to get a little messier. They need to make bolder bets. They need to be less afraid to launch things. They need to go back to that ethos of move fast and break things,” he concluded.
In response to the delayed implementation of AI features in its products, Apple undertook major decisions in its AI strategy. According to the podcast, Apple software chief Craig Federighi hesitated to invest heavily in AI.
An anonymous Apple executive also told Gurman that one cannot tell what the product will be like until investments are made, which meant that the company did not buy expensive GPUs and did not have enough of them to keep up with the competitors.
John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, believed people were not interested in AI chatbots. He informed his team that customers often preferred disabling features like ChatGPT. “He did a lot of analysis of what features people were using and not using in Siri, and proposed killing a lot of those features,” Gurman said. According to Bloomberg, some employees attribute challenges to decisions made by specific executives, while others see deeper issues. Apple’s success has historically relied on in-house technologies, like multitouch for the iPhone and advanced chips for newer devices, but this approach hasn’t worked with AI.
