To say that AI has been a pain point for Apple over the past two years or so would be an understatement. The company lagged behind the competition in unveiling its AI features, which it dubbed Apple Intelligence, and many of them weren’t ready when its iPhone 16 series hit shelves last year. While other AI features have come to Apple users with a delay, the company’s revamped Siri has not. The modernized version of Siri was expected to roll out with the iOS 18.4 update last year, but it never happened, and the company later admitted that the rollout would be delayed by a year or so. Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, admitted earlier this year that the planned Siri overhaul did not pass the necessary quality control within the company and hoped that it would be ready in time for a rollout in 2026. The new Siri is expected to make its debut next year with the iOS 26.4 update and is expected to be about six months from launch. However, Apple whistleblower and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman noted that Apple engineers are still concerned about the performance of the new Siri. In his weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman wrote, “I strongly believe there will be more senior members of the company’s AI ranks hitting the exits soon, especially if the new Siri drops this spring. There are already concerns from people testing iOS 26.4 — the OS version expected to include the new Siri — about the voice assistant’s performance.” The departures Gurman is talking about here are from the company’s founding model team, most of which were recruited by Meta, which formed a new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit. Meanwhile, if reports are to be believed, there is uncertainty within Apple about developing and using its internal models or using models from competitors such as Anthropic or Google for future AI offerings. Among the top departures within Apple are its AI search chief Ke Yang, Head of Foundations Models team Ruoming Pang, and AI and Search Executive Robby Walker. Apple’s Siri Revamp Strategy Apple has reportedly been working on two different approaches for the Siri revamp: one prefers to use its own model, which will run on the device, and another to use Google’s Gemini model, which runs on Private Cloud Compute. Gurman did not go into detail about which model performance criticism was seen in the company. During the WWDC 2024 conference, Apple showed on-screen awareness, personal context understanding and cross-app actions for Siri. If realized, it would help the voice assistant become a “hands-free” controller for the iPhone, as Apple intended. Instead, Siri now relies on ChatGPT to answer more difficult user queries, and the voice assistant is facing increasing competition from a wave of AI startups.
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