Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.
The decision came after executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of a generative artificial intelligence that can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions has made Siri seem outdated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri was for years limited to individual requests and was never able to follow a conversation. Frequently misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked about the weather in San Francisco and then said, “What about New York?” that user wanted a different forecast.
The realization that new technology had overtaken Siri set in motion the tech giant’s most significant reorganization in more than a decade. Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s AI race, Apple has turned generative AI into a tentpole project — a special, internal label the company uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives.
Apple is expected to show off its AI work at its annual developer conference on June 10 when it releases an improved Siri that is more conversational and flexible, according to three people familiar with the company’s work who were not authorized to speak publicly . Siri’s core technology will include a new generative AI system that will allow it to chat instead of answering questions one by one.
The Siri update is at the forefront of a broader effort to embrace generative AI across Apple’s businesses. The company is also increasing the memory in this year’s iPhones to support Siri’s new capabilities. Licensing of complementary AI models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI, has also been discussed.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Apple executives worry that the new AI technology threatens the company’s dominance of the global smartphone market because it has the potential to become the main operating system, displacing the iPhone’s iOS software, two people familiar with Apple management’s thinking said. who were not authorized to speak publicly. This new technology could also create an ecosystem of AI apps known as agents that can order Ubers or make calendar appointments, undermining Apple’s App Store, which generates about $24 billion in annual sales.
Apple also fears that if it fails to develop its own AI system, the iPhone could become a “dumb brick” compared to other technologies. While it’s unclear how many people regularly use Siri, the iPhone currently takes 85 percent of global smartphone profits and generates more than $200 billion in sales.
That sense of urgency contributed to Apple’s decision to scrap its other big bet — a $10 billion project to develop a self-driving car — and reassign hundreds of engineers to work on AI
Apple has also explored creating servers that are powered by its iPhone and Mac processors, two of the people said. This could help Apple save money and create consistency between the tools used for processes in the cloud and on its devices.
Instead of competing directly with ChatGPT by releasing a chatbot that does things like write poetry, the three people familiar with its work said, Apple has focused on making Siri better at tasks it already does. including setting timers, creating calendar appointments, and adding items to a grocery list. It will also be able to summarize text messages.
Apple plans to bill the improved Siri as more personal than competing AI services because it will process requests on the iPhone rather than remotely in data centers. The strategy will also save money. OpenAI spends about 12 cents for about 1,000 words that ChatGPT generates due to cloud computing costs.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)
But Apple faces risks by relying on a smaller AI system located on the iPhone instead of a larger one stored in a data center. Research has found that smaller AI systems may be more prone to making mistakes known as hallucinations than larger ones.
“The vision for Siri has always been to have a conversational interface that understands language and context, but that’s a difficult problem,” said Siri co-founder Tom Gruber, who worked at Apple until 2018. “Now that the technology has changed, it would it should have been possible to do much better than that. As long as it’s not a universal effort to answer anything, then they should be able to avoid problems.
Apple has several advantages in the AI race, including more than two billion devices in use worldwide where it can distribute AI products. It also has a leading semiconductor team that makes sophisticated chips capable of powering AI tasks like facial recognition.
But Apple has struggled to develop a comprehensive AI strategy over the past decade, and Siri hasn’t seen much improvement since its introduction. The assistant’s struggles dulled the appeal of the company’s HomePod smart speaker, as it couldn’t consistently perform simple tasks like fulfilling a song request.
The Siri team didn’t get the attention and resources that went to other groups at Apple, said John Berkey, who worked on Siri for two years before founding the generative AI platform, Brighten.ai. The company’s divisions, such as software and hardware, operate independently of each other and share limited information. But AI needs to be pushed through products to succeed.
“It’s not in Apple’s DNA,” Mr Burkey said. “It’s a blind spot.”
Apple also struggles to hire and retain top AI researchers. Over the years, it acquired AI companies led by leaders in the field, but all of them left within a few years.
The reasons for their departure are varied, but one factor is Apple’s secrecy. The company publishes fewer papers on its AI work than Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and it doesn’t participate in conferences in the same way that its competitors do.
“Researchers are saying, ‘What are my other options? Can I go back to the academy? Can I go to a research institute, some place where I can work a little more outdoors?” said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a leading AI researcher who left Apple in 2020 to return to Carnegie Mellon University.
In recent months, Apple has increased the number of AI posts it publishes. But prominent AI researchers questioned the value of the documents, saying they were more about giving the impression of meaningful work than providing examples of what Apple could bring to market.
Tsu-Jui Fu, an Apple intern and PhD student in AI at UC Santa Barbara, wrote one of Apple’s latest articles on AI. He spent last summer developing a system for editing photos with written commands rather than Photoshop tools. He said that Apple supported the project by providing it with the necessary GPUs to train the system, but that he had no interaction with the AI team working on Apple products.
Although he said he interviewed for full-time jobs at Adobe and Nvidia, he plans to return to Apple after graduating because he feels he can make a bigger difference there.
“AI products and research are emerging at Apple, but most companies are very mature,” Mr. Fu said in an interview with The Times. “At Apple, I can have more room to lead a project instead of just being a member of a team doing something.”
