Wayne Ma at The Information: ‘How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover’

Blockbuster report by Wayne Ma for The Information (paywalled and pricey, alas):

But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine-learning group led by Giannandrea — known as AI/ML for short — told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution. They singled out Walker as lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of the voice assistant.

Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture and struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials: AIMLess.

Ouch. Ma names names, and the report is full of scoops:

One Siri leader often criticized by colleagues was Walker, who joined Apple in 2013 and became responsible for its daily operations at the end of 2022. In the eyes of his critics, Walker was unwilling to take big risks on Siri and focused on metrics that didn’t move the needle much on its performance, rather than having a grand vision for overhauling the voice assistant.

For instance, he often celebrated small wins such as reducing by minute percentages the delay between when someone asked Siri a question and when it responded, former Apple engineers said. Another pet Walker project was removing the “hey” from the “hey Siri” voice command used to invoke the assistant, which took more than two years to accomplish, they said.

What Ma describes is a scenario where Walker missed the fact that the whole forest sucked and didn’t work, while focusing on one or two nice trees. Faster response times are a win, no question — but a small win, only at the margin. Faster wrong or useless (or even just mediocre) answers are, I guess, better than slower wrong/useless answers, but the overall result is a loss. Fast helpful answers are the goal, obviously, but slow helpful answers are infinitely better than fast useless ones. (I’m not even sure eliminating the requirement to use the verbal “hey” prefix was a win at all. It’s purely anecdotal and personal, but I think I get more unwanted invocations now than I did when “Hey Siri” was the required prompt. Like when I’m talking to someone and start a sentence with “Seriously …” Siri will kick in on one of my devices with a “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”)

One last nugget:

Other resentments also built up. Some in the software engineering group were annoyed by the higher pay and faster promotions their colleagues in the AI group were receiving. And they were bitter that some engineers in the AI group seemed to be able to take longer vacations and leave early on Fridays, while they faced more-punishing work schedules.

Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team.

It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.

Hundreds of engineers for a machine learning team outside Apple’s AI/ML division sounds like the definition of dysfunction. I really doubt Federighi has also assembled a large team of silicon engineers outside Johny Srouji’s division, because Srouji’s team is not merely functional, but rightly regarded as one the highest-functioning engineering divisions in any field in the world.

I wish I could share a gift link to Ma’s report, but The Information’s gift links for subscribers only work for up to three people. The best I can do is point to Hartley Charlton’s summary for MacRumors.

★ Thursday, 10 April 2025