Floundering and internal disagreements... Chaos at Apple behind the failure of the developer's “Siri” project
The information website published a new report highlighting the internal turmoil in Apple that hindered the development of the new Siri project with its smart Apple intelligence features, as well as revealing administrative chaos and technical confusion that negatively affected the company's ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence.
According to the report, Apple has studied several options for operating its Apple Intelligence smart features, including the development of two language models: a small model called “Mini Mouse” that works locally in iPhones and a large one known as “Mighty Mouse” managed through the cloud. But the management of Siri abandoned this plan in favour of one huge language model that works in the cloud before retreating again towards other technical directions, which caused frustration among engineers and prompted some to leave the company.
Cultural and Personal Conflicts
The crisis was not limited to technical confusion but also exacerbated by personal differences within the work teams, along with a work culture described as ”relaxed" and a weak incentive to take risks, according to more than six former employees in the artificial intelligence and machine learning department at Apple.
Some employees reported that the Siri group has become known internally as "AIMLess “in reference to the loss of purpose and orientation, while Siri is referred to as a” fireball" that moves from one team to another without significant improvements.
It is noteworthy that the word AIMLess is a linguistic manipulation that combines the word AIML, which is an abbreviation for Apple Intelligence and Machine Learning (i.e., artificial intelligence and machine learning in Apple), and the word “aimless” in English, which means “aimless.”
The report pointed to other internal disputes at Apple related to differences in salaries, promotions, long vacations, and short working hours enjoyed by some employees in artificial intelligence teams compared to others.
Leadership Perspectives
The head of the artificial intelligence department at Apple, John Gianandrea, believed that he could fix Siri through better training and accurate models for extracting information from the internet, and he did not show much concern when launching ChatGPT in 2022 but told his employees then that this type of smart chat does not offer real value to users.
In contrast, Robbie Walker, director of Siri, focused on what the report described as” small achievement“s, such as reducing response time, and one of his most notable projects was the removal of the word” Hey “from the voice command” Hey Siri," a modification that took more than two years to implement, and also rejected an initiative by an engineering team aimed at introducing emotional sensitivity in Siri that would make the voice assistant able to detect cases of discomfort or distress in users.
The report pointed out that the presentation made by Apple during the WWDC 2024 conference on the advanced features of Apple Intelligence, such as Siri's ability to analyse email to extract flight data, remind the user of lunchtime, and draw a route through Maps, was not real and even surprised some members of the Siri team who had not seen working copies of these capabilities.
This trend of providing an unreal review of new features is a rare departure from Apple's policy, which has always been keen to present technologies that are actually ready for testing and deployment at its official events.
However, there are still some hopes within the company that Craig Federighi, head of software engineering, and Mike Rockwell, Siri's new president, will be able to get Siri back on track, especially with Federighi's explicit instructions to engineers to do everything necessary to develop the best advantages of artificial intelligence, even if it requires using open-source models from other companies instead of just internal Apple technologies.
Future Plans
The New York Times reported in a recent report that Apple plans to launch an improved, smarter version of “Siri” by the fall of 2025, that is, before the end of this year.
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