Apple’s Siri digital assistant service and artificial intelligence technology development limited

The Information website earlier reported that internal issues between Apple’s team for Siri digital assistant service and its artificial intelligence technology team have resulted in Apple falling behind rivals such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google in enhancing Siri’s performance and advancing artificial intelligence technology development.

The Information website’s report cited at least three former Apple employees who had worked on artificial intelligence and machine learning projects. The New York Times also published similar reports recently, indicating that Apple faces constraints in developing its Siri digital assistant service and artificial intelligence technology. One reason is that Apple was unable to retain qualified talents.

For instance, Laserlike, a startup company that Apple acquired in 2019, was founded by three engineers who had worked on artificial intelligence-related technologies at Google: Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary, and Steven Baker. Although they continued to assist in improving Siri’s performance after joining Apple, they were eventually persuaded back to Google by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The main factor that influenced these engineers’ decision to return to Google was that Apple did not establish its own large-scale natural language model like Google and other technology companies did. And this kind of model is the key basis for the recent development of automatic generative artificial intelligence technology.

On another note, even after Apple hired John Giannandrea, who had overseen Google’s artificial intelligence business, it still could not improve the user experience of Siri digital assistant service. Some basic functions took several weeks to be improved.

According to internal sources, Apple initially planned to use Siri digital assistant service as the interactive feature of the rumored virtual vision headset. But the unsatisfactory actual experience, led Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president responsible for this product, to once consider creating a new voice interaction interface to replace the plan of using Siri digital assistant.

At the same time, Apple’s senior executives have always been concerned that Siri digital assistant service would provide incorrect answers during user interaction. This also limits Apple’s internal team in developing artificial intelligence technology. It becomes a situation where most of the time is spent explaining how to enhance technology to senior executives and compromising on related technology development approaches. Therefore, it also makes internal employees doubt whether Apple can gain an edge in this wave of automatic generative artificial intelligence technology development.