The hits keep coming when it comes to what’s going on with Apple, Siri, and AI. For this round, we go to Tripp Mickle writing for The New York Times:

The A.I. stumble was set in motion in early 2023. Mr. Giannandrea, who was overseeing the effort, sought approval from the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook, to buy more A.I. chips, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, five people with knowledge of the request said. The chips, which can perform hundreds of computations at the same time, are critical to building the neural networks of A.I. systems, like chatbots, that can answer questions or write software code.

At the time, Apple’s data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old — far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of chips being bought at the time by A.I. leaders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, these people said.

Mr. Cook approved a plan to double the team’s chip budget, but Apple’s finance chief, Luca Maestri, reduced the increase to less than half that, the people said. Mr. Maestri encouraged the team to make the chips they had more efficient.

For a company that says it doesn’t like looking back at its own history, very often, Apple makes decisions like it’s the late 1990s and the company is on the verge of failure. That drives it to make incredible products, but it also means Apple can be incredibly stingy. To play in the AI race, you’ve got to be willing to spend piles and piles of cash.

Jason Snell likes to say that when reading a report like this, it’s important to consider possible sources. Clearly, if Apple was stuck training AI models on 50,000 GPUs from 2018, it could lead to the underwhelming AI features we have today. Maestri may have plenty of blame at his feet, but he’s not alone.

This story is just one piece of the overall picture that is coming into focus. Apple was late to AI. It was unwilling to spend the money required, and the team working on these features was poorly run and fell into infighting as the rest of the company watched and rolled its eyes. Lots of people inside the company are to blame for this mess, not just Luca Maestri and John Giannandrea.1

  1. Of note, both Maestri and Giannandrea have recently seen their responsibilities change. Some might say those changes are related to Apple Intelligence and Siri. ↩︎