According to sources, the teams at Apple working on Siri and artificial intelligence are experiencing a great deal of chaos. Organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition have hindered Apple’s efforts to improve Siri and the backend technology that powers it.
This dysfunction has caused Apple to fall further behind competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. This has led some Apple employees to question the future of the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
Sources report that the Siri team, led by former Google executive John Giannandrea, is struggling with employee retention. Three Siri engineers, Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker, and Anand Shukla, left Apple to join Google. These engineers had been working on Siri search features but were enticed by Google’s opportunities to work on large language models, or LLMs, which is the technology behind platforms like Google Bard and ChatGPT.
Sources say that Google was so eager to acquire these engineers that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally reached out to them. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also tried to persuade them to stay but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Inside Apple, sources suggest that Siri remains widely criticized by employees. At one point, the team working on Apple’s Reality Pro headset reportedly became so frustrated with Siri that it considered building alternative methods for controlling the headset with voice technology.
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One of the reasons for Siri’s lack of functionality and improvements since Giannandrea took over is that “top executives” at Apple are cautious about Siri making major mistakes in its responses. This caution stems from the fear of embarrassing headlines and bad press, as we have seen with ChatGPT and other platforms.
Leaders of Apple’s AI and machine-learning team have addressed these tensions in all-hands meetings, acknowledging that mistakes are bound to happen and that it is their responsibility to educate Apple’s top executives about how machine-learning models improve. One compromise reached by Giannandrea and the search team led by Venkatachary was to create a button that allows users to report concerns or issues with the content of a Siri answer.
However, multiple incidents that have affected Siri have led former employees to doubt Apple’s ability to successfully match the technology behind platforms like ChatGPT.
Sources explain that these incidents are the reason why many former employees in Apple’s AI group are skeptical that the company will be successful in developing the next wave of AI products based on LLMs. Apple’s senior leaders have not shown much appetite for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes that ChatGPT and other services have experienced over the past few months.
Despite the internal struggles and challenges, Apple engineers are still working to improve Siri and its AI capabilities. The sources indicate that Apple is committed to staying competitive in the AI space and will continue to invest in the development of the technology.
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