For years, tons of people have wondered why Siri has seemed so stuck in the mud, seemingly impossible for Apple to improve in meaningful ways. Now, thanks to a new report in The Information, we know a lot more about the mess behind the scenes. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has a recap:
In addition to Apple’s deeply ingrained stance on privacy, conflicting personalities within Apple contributed to the problems. More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Apple’s AI and machine-learning group told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution, citing an overly relaxed culture, as well as a lack of ambition and appetite for taking risks when designing future versions of Siri .
Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements. There were also conflicts about higher pay, faster promotions, longer vacations, and shorter days for colleagues in the AI group.
Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was apparently confident he could fix Siri with the right training data and better web-scraping for answers to general knowledge questions. Senior leaders didn’t respond with a sense of urgency to the debut of ChatGPT in 2022; Giannandrea told employees that he didn’t believe chatbots like ChatGPT added much value for users.
The whole thing is worth a read. Hopefully Siri’s new leadership can get things moving in the right direction.