The subject of Siri, and the upgrades Apple promised back at WWDC 2024, has been pretty hot the past few months. Ever since Apple had to delay the rollout of Siri's AI-infused upgrades, on account of it taking "longer than [Apple] thought." Well, it sounds like this might be a learning experience for Apple.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett have a mammoth report on Apple's Siri fiasco, and the rollout of what is apparently internally known as "LLM Siri." In fact, due to all the high-profile delays, both reporters say that Apple isn't going to be announcing new features so far in advance from now on.
It sounds like this is the same lesson Apple should have learned with the AirPower charger, which was announced back in 2017 and then never got released. All because Apple announced the charger too early, before it realized it wasn't actually able to make it.
Apple was blindsided by ChatGPT
The report goes into a lot of detail, but I will try to explain the situation behind Apple's AI blunders as simply as possible. One key problem is that Apple started off late and, as previous leaks have claimed, the sudden popularity of services like ChatGPT caught the company by surprise.
In fact, despite having an AI department for many years previously, Apple hadn't even considered the concept of Apple Intelligence before the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Following that, it seemed Apple had to scramble to catch up — all while the rest of the tech industry was doing the same.
Before the launch of ChatGPT, Apple's software head Craig Federighi was reluctant to invest in what was needed to improve Apple's AI capabilities — especially since there was no end goal. According to sources, it wasn't until after ChatGPT was released and Federighi used generative AI in one of his projects that the benefits became clear to him.
That led to a sudden pivot towards generative-AI features for the then-upcoming iOS 18. Despite the pivot to LLMs, it became clear that Apple wasn't going to be able to catch up — and Apple's chatbot was lagging behind the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini.
Apple seems to have got a lot of stuff wrong
One way Apple attempted to catch up was to bolt the new LLM Siri onto the Old Siri, which is the biggest problem with rolling out the new feature to iOS. It was described by sources as "whack-a-mole", with three bugs popping up every time an old problem was fixed.
Apparently, individual features look good, but integrating them as a whole "Siri" assistant causes everything to fall apart. So it's no surprise that the new LLM Siri has been delayed as much as it has.
Apple's AI chief, John Giannandrea, has taken much of the blame for Apple's AI faults since he isn't a "forceful" personality like other executives. Not only does this mean he's alleged to have not fought hard enough for funding for the AI department, but employees also claim that he isn't actually pushing the team hard enough.
This is partly because he doesn't see rival chatbot makers as serious threats to Apple, but also potentially because he doesn't believe chatbots are the kind of features consumers actually want.
However, Giannandrea has claimed that Siri's failure is not on him — and should be placed on Apple's marketing teams for overhyping and focusing on features that weren't finished. Apparently, this is something product managers are responsible for finalizing, which in this case would be Federighi.
And the final insult is that Apple was a little too conservative in buying the GPUs necessary for AI processing. Apparently, this led to Apple's rivals buying up all the supply, and the lack of GPUs meant Apple's models were trained a lot more slowly as a result.
What does this mean for Siri now?
The one thing the report makes clear is that Apple is "unlikely" to spend much time talking about Siri at WWDC 2025. Even the features that have already been announced, but have yet to materialize, are still "months away" from shipping.
If there's anything Apple's good at, it's brushing its defeats under the rug and ploughing forward. So expect WWDC to focus on iOS 19, which is expected to get a major redesign, and other features ready to go when the update arrives this fall.
We may even hear more about changes coming to Apple Intelligence, but if this report is accurate, we shouldn't expect a repeat of last year. Which we can all agree is a good thing. The promise of Apple Intelligence is all well and good, but people don't really like buying promises, especially when those promises can be broken.
You can check out our WWDC 2025 hub for all the latest news and predictions about the upcoming show.
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