Apple is facing some intense scrutiny after yet again flubbing its AI tech.
During the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday, the company showed off its latest vision for "Apple Intelligence," a suite of tools that use machine learning to scan images for objects or smush emojis together to form custom Franken-reacts — cutesy ideas that fall vastly short of the ambition of competitors in the space like OpenAI.
The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern sat down with Apple's software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak following the event, and the execs squirmed trying to explain why a smarter Siri assistant — once the vanguard of consumer-facing AI and now dustbin junk compared to products like ChatGPT — is still missing in action.
That's despite some big promises. During last year's WWDC, Apple showed off a "more personal Siri" that promised huge new capabilities for the assistant built on generative AI. But by March, the company had pulled an iPhone 16 ad that made huge promises for the tech, admitting that a more advanced Siri was "going to take us longer than we thought."
In the year 2025, Siri is still a barely usable way to start timers or send somebody a quick iMessage, massively overshadowed by AI models that can analyze research papers, generate code, or generate photorealistic video.
Federighi and Joswiak had a tough time explaining how the multi-trillion-dollar tech giant has fallen so far behind the competition, which has been running laps around it when it comes to AI implementation.
The two executives seemed awfully flustered as they tried to dodge Stern's piercing questions, highlighting how much pressure has been built up over a year of empty promises and walking back claims.
A purported "V1" of a conversational Siri AI simply "didn't converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to," Federighi said. "We had something working, but then, as you got off the beaten path... and we know with Siri, it's open-ended what you might ask it to do, and the data that might be on your device that would be used in personal knowledge..."
"We wanted it to be really, really reliable," he concluded. "And we weren't able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought."
The situation Apple finds itself in is, in many ways, a perfect snapshot of the current state of the tech. AI chatbots continue to hallucinate with abandon, leaving a wake of chaos and confusion in their wake. That's despite billions of dollars being poured into the resource-intensive models that power them.
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