Macworld According to the latest Apple tea, Siri is a four-letter word that shan’t pass Apple’s lips. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Siri will not be discussed much at next month’s WWDC. That makes sense. The Macalope never wants to talk about things he’s not good at, either. Coding. Rollerskating. Integrals. Flossing. Both the dental regimen and the dance. Seven years after [Apple SVP of AI John] Giannandrea arrived, the optimism he brought with him is gone. Apple’s AI has only fallen further behind. Mark Gurman, May 19, 2025 This is sort of true and sort of not true. Part of the problem for Apple is that AI has been redefined out from under it. For most, AI is now a user-facing chatbot. That’s it. Sure, there are other, more visual implementations of AI, but the most common implementation is a text-based or verbal chatbot that gives you answers you can’t really trust, but allows CEOs to lay some people off because who cares if our customers are getting good information? Apple continued to chug away at the good parts of AI, the parts that would make your phone operate better or let you get rid of unattractive people or exes or unattractive exes from your photos. The problem is really not that Apple has “fallen behind.” It’s definitely behind on the chatty parts of AI, but that’s not really what most customers want. People do want a Siri that has persistent memory or can just do more things and do them consistently. No one, however, wants a Siri that can write a novel or come up with great recipes culled from Reddit threads where people are jokingly telling each other to eat things humans should not consume. That does seem to be what it’s trying to rush to market, though. According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT. It can get things wrong, but insist that they’re true with the best of them. Excellent. So why hasn’t the company shipped this already? Colleagues say Giannandrea has told them that consumers don’t want tools like ChatGPT and that one of the most common requests from customers is to disable it. You don’t say. So, if the problem isn’t that Apple’s behind ChatGPT, what is the problem? If you’d like to receive regular news and updates to your inbox, sign up for our newsletters, including The Macalope and Apple Breakfast, David Price’s weekly, bite-sized roundup of all the latest Apple news and rumors.IDG Let’s go back to the summer of 2009. The Black Eyed Peas were singing “I Gotta Feeling,” the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone, and the hot technology industry trend was… netbooks. Remember netbooks? They were small, cheap, underpowered, and poorly made, but boy, were they cheap. Apple, you might be surprised to learn, was “behind” on netbooks. Netbooks were going to eat the company’s lunch because it didn’t have one. All it had was the over-priced MacBook Air that was only for fancy-pants executives. But Apple didn’t want to make a low-margin piece of junk even if the entire industry was falling over each other to do just that. Despite all the cries, it was out of its mind, it simply made the MacBook Air a demonstrably better product, cheaper and cheaper, and soon enough, the tech industry was chasing something else and had forgotten all about netbooks. The parallels here are not exact but they’re also not that different. AI is “the thing you have to have” because investors–not customers–say so, even though so far no one has really figured out how to make a lot of money off of LLMs. Well, except for the individuals running AI companies who are probably making really good money despite their companies not making any profit. Apple stuck to its guns with netbooks. It didn’t with AI. If Apple had said, “Oh, you kids go ahead and have fun!” it might well have been able to let other companies pop this bubble instead of joining the chase for the latest industry unicorn. One of its long-time strengths was not listening to industry groupthink and instead figuring out what customers really want. This time, it fell victim to the pressure of investors, pundits, and venture capitalists. Time will tell, but the Macalope thinks Giannandrea might have been right.

Problems, they say, are gifts to help you change. If that’s the case, then Apple has some changing to do, at least when it comes to AI development, which a new Bloomberg report suggests is in crisis.  The crisis runs so deep, allegedly, that Apple will introduce no Siri upgrades at WWDC 2025 — and the report claims to have seen internal data that shows Apple “remains years behind its competition.” It paints a picture of weak leadership, conflicting priorities, flawed decision-making, and problematic integration between teams.  It particularly points at weak communication between Apple’s AI and marketing teams, evidenced by the heavy hype thrown at Apple Intelligence last year, even before features were baked — some of which have still failed to launch. The central claim seems to be that the debut of generative AI came as a complete surprise to Apple management, who were moving at a more deliberate pace. Internal conflicts Some of the biggest problems, however, appear to be based on misalignment of budget, as some teams got less than they needed to put effective AI solutions together. Some of the blame sits at the feet of Apple’s AI leader, John Giannandrea, who insiders say should have been more aggressive in pursuing the funding he needed. He should have shouted harder to get what he needed, the report implies. Other claims lean into assertions we’ve already heard, such as the idea that after resistance to genAI investment, Apple SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi had a eureka moment as to its importance when using ChatGPT on a personal coding project. It seems that at that point, he finally understood the threat posed by genAI and mandated that work on artificial intelligence intensify – which is when work on what we now call “Apple Intelligence” really began. Changing tactics Apple has been changing its approach rapidly in recent months, since the company famously missed its schedule for launch of the biggest Apple Intelligence feature of contextual intelligence in Siri. That miss has clearly become a crisis at Apple. Since it was revealed, elements of the existing AI leadership have been shifted aside, projects realigned, and budgets reallocated, but the problems aren’t yet resolved. With a resolve to “do whatever it takes,” Apple has also become more open to partnership. Its original AI partnership with OpenAI will now be extended to others, likely including Google and more. The company is also working with Anthropic to deploy AI from that company in Xcode. Part of this crisis seems to extend from the difference between Apple’s existing machine intelligence models and the genAI it hopes to deploy. The report cites an illustration of Siri, which remains less effective at some tasks than competing services can be, with integration attributed as the cause. Meanwhile, the company has a team building a version of Siri that is entirely LLM-based, aiming to make Siri more conversational and better at processing information. This will eventually replace the hybrid Siri that Apple is using at the moment. Interestingly, the report says Apple is training the LLM Siri with synthetic data, which implies some useful advances in that side of AI technology.  The impact of choice All of these problems, the report implies, seem so great that Apple may decide to extend the opportunity to replace Siri with other, less private voice assistants on its devices.  It may have to.  The company is already working to enable that kind of choice in Europe as it expects it may be required to under what it sees as the bloc’s opaquely applied Digital Markets Act. One way to look at this could be that if Apple can’t quickly make Siri an effective competitor, it may need to give users a choice of assistant. Even if the AI isn’t Apple’s, the device used to run that code should still be.  It’s a high-risk plan — particularly as we wait on an AI-powered device reported to be in development at OpenAI — but remains one that Apple may have to take as it responds to what Bloomberg seems to want to characterize as failure by Apple’s leadership.  Despite the hyperbole, in my view, the company still has time in which to get things right, thanks to the high customer satisfaction its hardware and software generate. While people are increasingly making casual use of AI, justifiable suspicion of the tech remains, and Apple can continue to generate credibility by maintaining its focus on building a private, focused version of AI that solves real problems real people face. If it takes more time to deliver on that promise, then so be it. Apple may decide it must become a lot more AI-transparent on its journey there, even as regulators force it to become more open. It must also never again make promises it cannot keep. Ultimately, it was failing to follow through on the promises it made when marketing Apple Intelligence that, more than anything else, left Apple looking weak. While it was at that time seen as being behind the curve, it now appears to be struggling. That’s not a look the people that run Apple will want to keep for very long. Problems, they say, are a gift to help you change, and a change (or two) is going to come. You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Here’s a little bit of positivity on Apple’s race to catch up to the competition in artificial intelligence. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is testing its own chatbot internally and has made significant progress in catching up with ChatGPT in the last six months. The report explains that Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea was initially reluctant to turn Siri into a ChatGPT-like chatbot, as he doubted the actual value of such tools. Despite those reservations, however, Apple executives are now “pushing to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. And while it may come as a surprise, it sounds like Apple is seeing early success in this effort, at least internally. Apple executives reportedly believe that the current version of the internal chatbot is “on par with recent versions of ChatGPT.” From the report: As for Apple’s homegrown chatbot efforts, some executives are now pushing, despite Giannandrea’s prior reluctance, to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. To that end, the company has started discussing the idea of giving the assistant the ability to tap into the open web to grab and synthesize data from multiple sources. According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT. The question, of course, is whether Apple can keep up the pace. It has not shipped a version of Siri powered by LLMs or adopted any sort of chatbot-style features powered by its own models. The risk is that Apple continues to fall further behind as its competitors continue to ship new models and features to their respective chatbot platforms. Apple is reportedly not planning to announce any major updates for Siri at WWDC next month. At the earliest, Apple’s “LLM Siri” platform is expected to debut later in the iOS 19 cycle. You can read the full report from Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett on Bloomberg’s website. My favorite iPhone accessories: Follow Chance: Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, and Mastodon.  Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Apple's executives are pushing for Siri to become a proper AI chatbot that scours the web, potentially as a direct competitor to ChatGPT. It's just not clear when that's going to happen.Apple's leadership wants Siri to have ChatGPT-style smarts. As part of the Apple Intelligence shift, Apple said it would overhaul Siri to be more context-aware, but that change has yet to arrive. However, if the urges of Apple's chiefs to change course work, Siri could become even more powerful down the road.According to Apple employees speaking to Bloomberg on Sunday, Apple executives are keen to make Siri into a competitor to current top chat bot, ChatGPT. While former Siri chief John Giannandrea was apparently reluctant to go down that route, the company's leadership are leaning to go that way with Siri. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple may have started late, and hit some speedbumps along the way, but Apple's Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, John Giannandrea, wants to beat Apple Intelligence into shape before handing over the reins to a successor.John Giannandrea is focusing on finally making Siri a more competitive AI engine.Giannandrea is still in charge of AI and Large Language Model (LLM) research, AI analysts, and integrating those technologies into the larger OS infrastructures. A report from Bloomberg suggests that some Apple executives would like to see his role reduced further, ahead of a near-future departure.Apple leadership reportedly wants to put Giannandrea on a path to retirement and the eventual naming of a successor. That said, the executive still attracts top engineers and researchers to Apple, so for now he's staying put. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”See More:

In a new, lengthy report regarding Apple’s AI strategy, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has detailed a number of strategic failures for the launch of Apple Intelligence. As many of us have already believed, Apple was caught off-guard by the new generative AI trend. Additionally, according to Gurman, Apple is ‘unlikely’ to spend a lot of time talking about Siri at this years WWDC. That includes future upgrades and the already announced (but since delayed) features from last years WWDC. What went wrong with Apple Intelligence I won’t be summarizing the entire report, so if you’d like to read it in full – you can do so here. In short, Apple software chief Craig Federighi didn’t believe a ton in AI. He was “reluctant” to invest a lot into the technology, and didn’t see it as a “core capability.” In Federighi’s eyes, it’d take away from everything else without actually paying off. This wasn’t just a Craig Federighi thing, though: Other leaders shared Federighi’s reservations. “In the world of AI, you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment,” another longtime executive says. “That’s not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the endgame is.” The report also claims that while other executives were “convinced” AI would be “revolutionary”, they were unable to convince Federighi. A lot of it “fell on deaf ears.” On top of that, Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was never truly able to hit the ground running. When he started at Apple, he concluded that Apple would need to spend a lot more money than it currently is. However, his efforts were “often stymied.” The future As for how Apple plans to bounce back from this strategic failure, well – we won’t find out quite yet. According to Gurman, that won’t be too big of a focus at next months WWDC, where Apple will announce iOS 19 and more: Significant upgrades to Siri—including the ones promised nearly a year ago—are unlikely to be discussed much and are still months away from shipping. The report reaffirms that Apple plans on adding additional Apple Intelligence capabilities to other apps, and that the company is also planning on adding an AI powered battery optimization tool. Apple also plans on launching Project Mulberry, a virtual health coach. Apple also is working on implementing a new capability for European Union residents: the ability to ditch Siri entirely. Instead of having Siri as your voice assistant, you’ll be able to use third-party options. Specific third-party options weren’t named, but it’s worth noting that this will be a distinct feature from the already-existing ChatGPT integration in Siri. Last but not least, Apple is continuing to work on its new “LLM Siri” infrastructure, which’ll fix a lot of the engineering mess that got us to severely-delayed Siri in the first place. Despite that, the company wants to separate Siri from Apple Intelligence in its marketing efforts: The Apple sources say the company, despite its hopes for LLM Siri, is also preparing to separate the Apple Intelligence brand from Siri in its marketing. It’s a tacit admission that the voice assistant’s poor reputation isn’t helping the company’s AI messaging.  Apple also wants to stop touting features more than a few months before they’re able to launch, according to the report. My favorite Apple accessory recommendations: Follow Michael: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel