{"id":171,"date":"2025-05-19T03:06:37","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T23:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/apple-is-trying-to-get-llm-siri-back-on-track\/"},"modified":"2025-05-19T03:06:37","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T23:06:37","slug":"apple-is-trying-to-get-llm-siri-back-on-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/apple-is-trying-to-get-llm-siri-back-on-track\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple is trying to get \u2018LLM Siri\u2019 back on track"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" data-caption=\"\" data-portal-copyright=\"\" data-has-syndication-rights=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/04\/STK071_APPLE_H.jpg?quality=90&amp;strip=all&amp;crop=0,0,100,100\" \/><figcaption><\/figcaption><\/p><\/figure>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-none\">Apple Intelligence has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/626035\/apple-delays-upgraded-siri-intelligence-longer-than-we-thought\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">been a wreck<\/a> since its first features rolled out last year, and a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/features\/2025-05-18\/how-apple-intelligence-and-siri-ai-went-so-wrong\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">big new report<\/a> from <em>Bloomberg<\/em>\u2019s Mark Gurman details why \u2014 and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-none\">Gurman has reported in the past that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2024\/11\/21\/24302685\/apple-llm-siri-compete-chatgpt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple is working on<\/a> what it\u2019s internally calling \u2018LLM Siri\u2019 \u2014 a reworked, generative AI version of the company\u2019s digital assistant. Apple\u2019s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn\u2019t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here\u2019s a quick summary:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Apple software chief Craig Federighi was \u201creluctant to make large investments in AI.\u201d<\/strong> The company doesn\u2019t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him \u201c\u2026you really don\u2019t know what the product is until you\u2019ve done the investment.\u201d That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn\u2019t rush to buy and later didn\u2019t have enough of to keep up with competitors.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Apple started late<em>. <\/em><\/strong>Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence \u201cwasn\u2019t even an idea\u201d before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn\u2019t want AI chatbots. <\/strong>He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Old Siri didn\u2019t work with new Siri. <\/strong>Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn\u2019t working. \u201cIt\u2019s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,\u201d an employee told Gurman.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Giannandrea didn\u2019t \u201cfit in\u201d with Apple\u2019s inner circle.<\/strong> Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2018\/4\/3\/17195076\/google-ai-chief-john-giannandrea-joining-apple-machine-learning-siri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">came on in 2018<\/a>, and he didn\u2019t have the same \u201cforceful\u201d personality as others in company leadership. He didn\u2019t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn\u2019t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn\u2019t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Marketing got out over its skis.<em> <\/em><\/strong>The company\u2019s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready \u2014 features that it has since <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/629940\/apple-siri-robby-walker-delayed-ai-features\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">been forced to delay<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-none\">Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will \u201centirely build on an LLM-based engine.\u201d Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant \u201cmore believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-none\">Another part of the solution is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/648496\/apple-improve-ai-models-differential-privacy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">leveraging iPhones<\/a> and differential privacy to improve Apple\u2019s synthesized data \u2014 comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users\u2019 emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to \u201cgrab and synthesize data from multiple sources.\u201d Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-none\">Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won\u2019t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him \u201con a path to retirement,\u201d but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, \u201crelieved Siri is now someone else\u2019s problem.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from [&hellip;]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/STK071_APPLE_H-1nRyKo.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}