It's a crisis at Apple, since the announcement of the postponement to 2026 of the functions that were supposed to allow Siri to draw on application data and "read" the user's screen to give more personalized responses. The manufacturer, which has communicated a lot about its assistant boosted by Apple Intelligence to sell iPhone 16, has discreetly withdrawn an advertisement on the subject and is now facing a complaint for advertising. false.
An investigation by the website The Information, which draws on the testimonies of several internal sources, sheds new light on this fiasco by revealing the behind-the-scenes details of Siri's development. And it's not glorious!
What stands out in particular is the animosity towards the team in charge of the assistant, led by John Giannandrea, Apple's head of AI, and Robby Walker, his right-hand man who handles day-to-day development. The latter is considered unambitious internally and too focused on minor improvements. As for Giannandrea, a Google defector, his "cool" management style contrasts with the demands of Craig Federighi, head of software engineering.
Tensions between the AI and software teams are said to be long-standing: lack of coordination, cultural rivalries, differences in management style, and conflicts over the direction to take, problems that exploded following the difficulties of integrating Apple Intelligence into Siri. The assistant was long considered a "second-class citizen" within Apple, an unstable project, moving from one division to another without a clearly defined direction.
Faced with the advent of ChatGPT and the meteoric rise of other generative AI models, Apple has been slow to relax. While Craig Federighi's team was already exploring the integration of models like those of OpenAI, Giannandrea's team remained skeptical, held back by privacy principles. Apple and an internal culture resistant to change.
Last June, during WWDC, the manufacturer presented a demo of the new Siri, capable of answering very complex questions requiring perfect knowledge of the user's personal information and deep integration with applications. Science fiction for Siri developers at the time: there was no working version of such a function!
This customization feature would have ended up being implemented, but by Robby Walker's own admission, who declared it during a meeting, Siri gives good results "about two times out of three"... Largely insufficient compared to ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot which run on full speed ahead (sometimes hallucinating, admittedly).
After the announcement of the postponement, Apple reorganized John Giannandrea's division, which removed the development of Siri, returning it to the structure led by Craig Federighi. It was Mike Rockwell who more specifically took over the assistant's destiny. The ideal man for the job: he was the one who saved the Vision Pro project from the waters, which was threatened by getting bogged down.
Source: The Information
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