I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
Apple never wargamed the Siri dialogue tree for iPhone `lost and found' recovery safely return to owner the one time first time I tried to use it seriously.
Yes that's because Apple marketing is always wildly overhyping the capacities of what they are selling.
In this case the lie was that Siri could understand you just like a real human but it really can't.
AI chat bots have some similar problems (figuring out what it can actually do) but at least they are much better at communicating like a human.
cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.
Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.
People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.
Focusing on privacy was obviously the right strategic move for Apple. People complain about Siri, but they still buy iPhones in huge volumes. And a huge part of that is the belief that it’s safe to use iPhones for private things.
In terms of actually building a profitable business, no one seems to know how to make that work with AI right now. Leaks suggest OpenAI may turn to ads to monetize ChatGPT… which will raise all sorts of data questions. Privacy concerns might yet be an issue with AI chatbots.
The only usage of Siri to me is to set hot spot so that it doesn’t shut down itself in a few mins. (And BTW why the f does it do that?) But it has failed to switch on Hotspot recently so I don’t use it anymore.
I think the main issue I have with Apple Intelligence via Siri is that it’s not very predictable anymore which things it can handle. Sometimes it will answer nuanced questions helpfully, and other times I’ll ask for it to play the only podcast in my lineup and it’ll instead play some random song I’ve never heard of. I find it more useful when I’m thinking and running and want an answer to a question, because I know I can get the answer whenever I stop long enough to pull my phone out, but in the meantime having the answer would help me work through something. I’d say my overall impression of the capabilities are negative, and it’s also not a surprise (it’s not like Apple pretended it can do things it can’t, which should have been their clue early on I guess)
If this video is to believed, this is the result of internal Apple politics between the software engineering folks, and the AI folks, with the software engineering folks "winning"
This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like.
I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.
I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).
At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?
Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever.
We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.
In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.
Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.
People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.
I can't believe Apple still hasn't rolled back or majorly revamped AI notification summaries. It's been over a year since launch, and their primary use case is pretty much just sharing screenshots when it does something hilarious/inappropriate.
This is a serious question that's partially mine, but I'm asking because of all the comments here: Specifically, what HAS Apple done with Siri over 15 years?
Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it just never launch? Am I simply ignorant?
My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.
Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.
53 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 66.4 ms ] threadWhat did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?
Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
In this case the lie was that Siri could understand you just like a real human but it really can't. AI chat bots have some similar problems (figuring out what it can actually do) but at least they are much better at communicating like a human.
1980s - silicon graphics / general magic
1990s - chief technologist, netscape
early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)
late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google
2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)
2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof
2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push
March 2025 - removed as head of Siri
Dec 2025 - retirement
would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!
-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20
cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.
Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."
People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.
In terms of actually building a profitable business, no one seems to know how to make that work with AI right now. Leaks suggest OpenAI may turn to ads to monetize ChatGPT… which will raise all sorts of data questions. Privacy concerns might yet be an issue with AI chatbots.
https://youtu.be/50XKNKGPWs8?si=nznI4ydFBT5pXfNa
I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.
I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).
At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?
We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.
In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.
Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.
People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.
Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it just never launch? Am I simply ignorant?