M.G. Siegler • #siri • Jun 9, 2025

Siri Doomed Apple in AI, Just Like Alexa Did with Amazon

Their previous "success" in assistants became albatrosses...

Seemingly not much new in this report, but the FT was able to pull a few "recently departed employees" out of the woodwork to give some context as to why Apple is where it is with regard to AI, and specifically, Siri – here's Michael Acton:

Recently departed employees told the Financial Times that the Silicon Valley giant has been hit by challenges with updating Siri using cutting-edge large language models that can deliver more sophisticated responses to spoken prompts.

Apple has been attempting to build its own LLMs over the machine learning technology that currently powers Siri, a product already used in hundreds of millions of its bestselling devices, with the aim of creating a truly conversational assistant.

Those "employees" get upgraded to "executives" for this next bit:

Former executives said that the process of integrating the technologies has led to bugs, an issue not faced by competitors such as OpenAI which have built generative AI-based voice assistants from scratch.

One former Apple executive said: “It was obvious that you were not going to revamp Siri by doing what executives called ‘climbing the hill’,” meaning to incrementally develop the product rather than rebuilding it from the ground up.

“It’s clear that they stumbled,” the person added.

Yes, it should have been obvious that this "climbing the hill" approach would not work. I wrote about this very topic a year ago, noting that both Apple and Amazon were likely struggling to launch into the current AI race because their past "successes" in Alexa and Siri, respectively, were holding them back in this way.

Whereas once they were dinosaurs presiding over the land, now they were beasts looking up at the incoming asteroid. It would have been easier to just rebuild the entire systems from the ground up, but that would have also meant abandoning or at least disrupting a user base in the tens of millions (or more in the case of Apple with Siri baked into every device).

It seems pretty clear now that Amazon ended up doing this full rebuild behind-the-scenes after trying the band-aid approach Apple has been trying – again, "climbing the hill". And it's probably related to why they've been so slow to roll out Alexa+ now. They can't mess-up functionality for millions until it's perfect. And it's clearly not perfect yet.

But Apple seems to be a whole cycle behind Amazon here. Which is why I've argued that they should fully outsource the "world knowledge" layer to ChatGPT (or another partner, but obviously the ChatGPT partnership is already in place) for now while they rebuild Siri (ideally under a new name/brand since this one is more or less ruined) behind the scenes from scratch.

Just how long might that take? Well, ideally not as long as Bank of America's analysts think!

The current delays to Siri mean that Apple is essentially three years or more away from delivering “a truly modern AI assistant, long after Google and others have integrated such tech,” Bank of America analysts wrote on Monday.

Come on, "three years or more" is 2028 (or later)! If Apple doesn't have an upgraded AI before then, something really went wrong. I think fall next year (2026) seems like a more reasonable guess for at least the first wave of roll-outs, a la Alexa+. The fire has clearly been lit internally, but they're also playing catch up in perhaps the fastest-moving field that tech has ever seen.

I still wonder if they don't make an acquisition to speed things up a bit more, but there's no way it takes them three or more years.

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, “the way companies were doing conversational interaction was changing rapidly, and it was clear Siri was coming up short,” said another former senior Apple employee who worked on the technology ahead of the launch.

The person added that they were “surprised” to see features announced last year that were ultimately “not going to make it” in time for Apple Intelligence’s initial release.

Thank you, unnamed "senior" Apple employee for your hindsight analysis. Was there an internal note sent to the effect of: "NGMI"?