Ya Exactly! I happend to stumble across that and I was like WTF?!! What did I just see? Also as an aside perhaps shouldn't be playing the weather as comedy wot with the Fires, Floods, and Mudslides in Cali.
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Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure
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They shouldn't have promoted it as 'apple intelligence', as if it's a whole separate thing.
AI is useful in bits and pieces on a phone, like removing unwanted objects from photos, and rewriting emails. If they just added in those all those improvements to the apps as they went along, and not tried to lump them all together into 'apple intelligence' then no one would be thinking it's lightweight
AI is useful in bits and pieces on a phone, like removing unwanted objects from photos, and rewriting emails. If they just added in those all those improvements to the apps as they went along, and not tried to lump them all together into 'apple intelligence' then no one would be thinking it's lightweight
Perhaps a change in attitude is needed at Apple. I was watching this earlier today, and it seemed relevant:
I'd do it (have tried to do it) but lack of Facetime and a shared iOS calendar with family is tough for me to get around. No one close to me wants to use other competing apps.
Man, imagine being an executive under Tim Cook.
No one ever gets fired, he just hires people who look, talk, and act exactly like him. You can screw up in a division for over a decade and nothing will happen to you ever. You get paid millions.
It has to be the greatest job ever
No one ever gets fired, he just hires people who look, talk, and act exactly like him. You can screw up in a division for over a decade and nothing will happen to you ever. You get paid millions.
It has to be the greatest job ever
One.
That's one heeeeeeeeeeck of a leak. Which is really REALLY bad and someone is Cosmic Secret level pissed at Apple and want to hurt the team.
OR it's intentional to create understanding/compassion for the delay somehow. But that's a bit over the manipulative even for Apple and it's also too much dirty underwear for Apple. And it's not polished ebo anyways.
So someone is very annoyed at either not being heard and wants to blame to be acknowledged. Or someone who got demoted/fired wants revenge.
In any care. Muy muy mal.
Two.
Are they not using their own product? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to have figured out a) Siri is bad and has been for quite some time and b) Apple Intelligence is not very useful either and wouldn't even6become useful in its current state anyway.
Are employees "fearful" to point out flaws or what? Because that could explain why poor functions got implemented in such a hurry.
That's one heeeeeeeeeeck of a leak. Which is really REALLY bad and someone is Cosmic Secret level pissed at Apple and want to hurt the team.
OR it's intentional to create understanding/compassion for the delay somehow. But that's a bit over the manipulative even for Apple and it's also too much dirty underwear for Apple. And it's not polished ebo anyways.
So someone is very annoyed at either not being heard and wants to blame to be acknowledged. Or someone who got demoted/fired wants revenge.
In any care. Muy muy mal.
Two.
Are they not using their own product? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to have figured out a) Siri is bad and has been for quite some time and b) Apple Intelligence is not very useful either and wouldn't even6become useful in its current state anyway.
Are employees "fearful" to point out flaws or what? Because that could explain why poor functions got implemented in such a hurry.
AI is a bigger deal than the average person makes it out to be.
But most are stuck in the “scared to death it will steal my job” and/or moral superiority camp to leverage it in their work.
You’re 100% correct, he would’ve been screaming at and firing people once he got wind of this nonsense.
It is a poor misstep for Apple to chase buzz words (e.g.: “AI”) by demonstrating vaporware that they plan to implement later. A dozen things can change in the development of a big feature and doing an artificial demo is almost sure to miss the mark as are projected timelines.
Apple (in the past) made it a point not to just throw things against the wall and demo vaporware. Apple would patiently and secretly develop things in-house and announce when it was fully baked. Despite the criticisms of the tech press.
For Apple to make such an obvious error is a bad sign. Combine that with announcing and releasing Vision Pro before it was anything more than a potential niche product and it is time for an intervention about going back to your core values: bringing technology to the intersection of liberal arts and making consumable and impactful for the masses.
Chasing the latest squirrel with such exuberance will continue these sort of errors.
Apple (in the past) made it a point not to just throw things against the wall and demo vaporware. Apple would patiently and secretly develop things in-house and announce when it was fully baked. Despite the criticisms of the tech press.
For Apple to make such an obvious error is a bad sign. Combine that with announcing and releasing Vision Pro before it was anything more than a potential niche product and it is time for an intervention about going back to your core values: bringing technology to the intersection of liberal arts and making consumable and impactful for the masses.
Chasing the latest squirrel with such exuberance will continue these sort of errors.
I'm in another camp on this. If Siri (or its successor) is going to be allowed to roam through my contacts, calendars, photos, location information, emails, messages and god knows what else then privacy and security are essential. If that means on-device processing takes longer to figure out, I'd rather wait than hand over the keys to my life to the likes of OpenAI.
And before you say "well just don't opt in" -- that doesn't help me one bit if the data about me that's on someone else's phone is all getting hoovered up regardless of my opting in or not.
I get that a lot of these cats are out of the bag at this point, but I'd rather Apple get it right than just "break things first and ask questions later" as is all too common in the tech industry.
"Seriously?!" people say, only to have Siri hear this and say "I'm sorry, I didn't get that?" 😆
If anything they should have worked on allowing user-defined arbitrary phrases to avoid the false positives (and for people with Sigrids in their household, there are Swedes 🇸🇪 that are probably Alexa users because of this!)
I actually have a Pixel 9 Pro coming tomorrow and have been de-Apple’ing my life for about a week now from Macs, iPads, ATV, etc. It’s hard but Google Gemini looks so good (don’t care about chat bots) and having been in the ecosystem for 15yrs and upgrading ever year on about every device I’m bored of the Apple repetitiveness. Apple used to take forever with software but when they did something it was better than the competitors…hasn’t been that way for years now. Apple hardware was always top notch but others have caught up as well.
Only issue I see with the Pixel Pro is some potential stuttering while scrolling and the fact my spouse might be upset cause I switched even though with RCS she may never notice if it wasn’t for the colored bubble. Guess we’ll see!
And that is what turned the PowerPoint of a non-existing Longhorn database-driven file system into Windows Vista. On the other hand, Windows Vista under Steven Sinofsky turned into Windows 7 which was an absolute win for Microsoft.
That is to say, with the right leadership a disaster can turn into an opportunity.
Less focus on the share price and more focus on the product please.
Excellent post. I hate when someone starts with "Steve would have..." and this one does not. It starts with a company ethos and philosophy which underscores where the current team is falling short. The middle discussion of not trying to find how to make people buy your great technical development strikes right at the heart of the issue. Without a doubt, VisionPro is a technical achievement, but what customer purpose/use does it fulfill? While heads down and even producing a single product only focused release, they missed the AI on ramp. They left it to Microsoft, which in typical Microsoft fashion fumbled inside the ten yard line. After all these years, they have yet to fix the most fundamental mistake in Siri - asking it a question you still get far too often "Look what I found, check it out" or "Here's what I found" with a listing of website "answers" that may or may not truly answer your question...start there...drop the little/big model theory and let Siri just be the gatekeeper to protect your anonymity when interfacing into the LLM in the sky.
And Motorola before them. It's inevitable. They had a good run.
Craig is the last person to innovate anything. He has wasted last year churning out different kind of Emojis
A new report from The Information today reveals much of the internal turmoil behind Apple Intelligence's revamped version of Siri.
Apple apparently weighed up multiple options for the backend of Apple Intelligence. One initial idea was to build both small and large language models, dubbed "Mini Mouse" and "Mighty Mouse," to run locally on iPhones and in the cloud, respectively. Siri's leadership then decided to go in a different direction and build a single large language model to handle all requests via the cloud, before a series of further technical pivots. The indecision and repeated changes in direction reportedly frustrated engineers and prompted some members of staff to leave Apple.
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.
In 2023, Apple managers told engineers that they were forbidden from including models from other companies in final Apple products and could only use them to benchmark against their own models, but Apple's own models "didn't perform nearly as well as OpenAI's technology."
Meanwhile, Siri leader Robby Walker focused on "small wins" such as reducing wait times for Siri responses. One of Walker's pet projects was removing the "hey" from the "hey Siri" voice command used to invoke the assistant, which took over two years to achieve. He also shot down an effort from a team of engineers to use LLMs to give Siri more emotional sensitivity so it could detect and give appropriate responses to users in distress.
Apple started a project codenamed "Link" to develop voice commands to control apps and complete tasks for the Vision Pro, with plans to allow users to navigate the web and resize windows with voice alone, as well as support commands from multiple people in a shared virtual space to collaborate. Most of these features were dropped because of the Siri team's inability to achieve them.
The report claims that the demo of Apple Intelligence's most impressive features at WWDC 2024, such as where Siri accesses a user's emails to find real-time flight data and provides a reminder about lunch plans using messages and plots a route in maps, was effectively fictitious. The demo apparently came as a surprise to members of the Siri team, who had never seen working versions of the capabilities.
The only feature from the WWDC demonstration that was activated on test devices was Apple Intelligence's pulsing, colorful ribbon around the edge of the display. The decision to showcase an artificial demonstration was a major departure from Apple's past behavior, where it would only show features and products at its events that were already working on test devices and that its marketing team had approved to ensure they could be released on schedule.
Some Apple employees are said to be optimistic that Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell can turn Siri around. Federighi has apparently instructed Siri engineers to do "whatever it takes to build the best AI features," even if that means using open-source models from other companies in its software products as opposed to Apple's own models.
For more details on Apple's Siri debacle, see The Information's full report.
Article Link: Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure
That's fair. I'm not arguing that Apple should hand our data over to OpenAI, just that it should loosen its stance on its own data collection. I'm willing to give more of my data to Apple in exchange for better Siri, not necessarily to third parties.
And here lies the issue that I anticipated with the death of Steve Jobs. Nobody in the C suite at Apple, including Tim Cook, were visionaries that could think three dimensionally like Steve and understand how upcoming technologies would meet upcoming user experiences in the future — and time would inevitably catch up to Apple.
Giannandrea should be fired for this lack of foresight. Heck, Tim Cook should consider sailing into the sunset. He's ultimately responsible for hiring Giannandrea and a team that was neither capable of demonstrating progress, and worse, Cook let the marketing team fake an inexistent feature set critical to the company's future. I stand by what I said years ago:
PixelPro is about the only one I would entertain. Have too many friends that have others devices and are frustrated that they dont get timely updates.