According to a new report from The Information, there is confusion and a lack of ambition within Apple’s work on Siri and artificial intelligence. This “organizational dysfunction and lack of ambition” has led Apple to improve Siri. And the technology behind it lags behind rivals such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, and even some Apple employees expressed doubts about its future.
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The report is based on “interviews with more than three dozen former employees of Apple’s AI and machine learning teams.” The New York Times published a similar report earlier this month, explaining how Siri was built on a “clumsy” database, leading to Siri updating “basic functions” that required ” weeks” time.
A major problem facing the Siri team is employee turnover. Apple has lost three Siri engineers who joined Google: Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker and Anand Shukla, The Information reports. The three employees originally joined Apple in 2019, when Apple acquired their startup, Laserlike. The three engineers had been working on the Siri search feature, but decided that Google was a better place to work on large language models (LLMs), the technology behind Google Bard and ChatGPT, among others. Google was so eager to get the three engineers, “that its CEO Sundar Pichai lobbied for the team himself,” the report said. On Apple’s side, CEO Tim Cook also “tried to convince them to stay,” but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Inside Apple, “Siri is still ridiculed by employees,” the report said. At one point, the team working on Apple’s headsets was so frustrated with Siri that it considered “building other ways” to control the headsets with voice technology.
In addition, one of the bottlenecks facing Siri is that Apple’s “top brass” are conservative about Siri making major mistakes in answering questions, which may lead to negative press and negative impact on the platform.
