To say that AI has been a problem for Apple over the past couple of years would be an understatement. The company lagged behind the competition in unveiling its AI features, which it dubbed Apple Intelligence, and many of them still weren’t ready by the time its iPhone 16 series went on sale last year.
While other AI features have been made available to Apple users with some delay, the revamped version of Siri has not. The modernized version of Siri was supposed to roll out with the iOS 18.4 update last year, but that never happened and the company later admitted that the rollout would be delayed by about a year.
Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, admitted earlier this year that Siri’s planned overhaul had failed to achieve the necessary quality control within the company and hoped it would be ready in time for a 2026 rollout.
The new Siri is expected to debut with the iOS 26.4 update next year and is still expected to be about six months away from launch. However, Apple whisperer 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 firmly believe that more and more senior members of the company’s AI ranks will soon leave the ranks, especially if the new Siri arriving in the spring falls flat.” Already, people testing iOS 26.4 – the version of the operating system expected to include the new Siri – are concerned about the voice assistant’s performance.
The departures Gurman discusses here concern the company’s core models team, most of whom 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 like Anthropic or Google for future AI offerings.
Major departures at Apple include Ke Yang, head of AI research, Ruoming Pang, head of the Foundation Models team, and Robby Walker, head of AI and research.
Apple’s Siri Redesign Strategy
Apple is reportedly working on two different approaches to redesigning Siri: one favors the use of its own model, which would run on the device, and the other the use of Google’s Gemini model, running on Private Cloud Compute.
Gurman did not go into detail about which models have faced performance criticism within the company.
At WWDC 2024, Apple demonstrated screen awareness, personal context understanding, and cross-app actions for Siri. If this had come to fruition, it would have helped the voice assistant become a “hands-free” controller for the iPhone, as Apple wanted. Instead, Siri now relies on ChatGPT to answer users’ more difficult queries, and the voice assistant faces growing competition from a wave of AI startups.
