Apple’s gloves-on approach with AI is giving Siri a bad look — Former staffers say it’s a “hot potato” being tossed around AIMLessly

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Over the past few months, Apple has faced significant challenges, mainly due to the underperformance of its AI initiatives, high tariffs imposed by President Trump, and weak iPhone sales. In contrast to tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, Apple could be seen as a relatively late entrant in the artificial intelligence field.

As CEO, Tim Cook frequently emphasizes Apple’s focus on being the best, rather than just the first, which has played a significant role in its achievements. Contrastingly, Apple’s AI strategy presented at WWDC 2024, called Apple Intelligence, doesn’t seem to have had the same level of success yet.

Although Apple’s intelligence appears to have passed privacy and security checks, it’s been nearly a year since we expected an updated Siri assistant from them. According to Mark Gurman’s report for Bloomberg, Apple may be as much as five years behind Microsoft in the AI competition, despite integrating ChatGPT into their revamped assistant.

Maybe it’s worth noting that according to The Information, Apple appears to have missed an opportunity to significantly improve Siri by incorporating advanced AI technology.

As per the report, it was anticipated that Apple intended to create both compact and extensive language models. The smaller model was envisioned to manage basic tasks locally, such as setting an alarm, while the larger one was designed to tackle more intricate tasks remotely, like booking a cab for an iPhone user.

As a researcher, I found myself surprised by Apple’s shift in strategy. Instead of following the original plan, they chose to develop a versatile model capable of handling various tasks. The drawback, however, is that this move deviated from their initial commitment to on-device AI, as the model will now be cloud-based.

As a result, multiple employees from Apple’s Siri team left due to what appeared to be higher management scaling back their ambitious AI assistant renovation plans. The report also reveals that this sudden shift in direction was the primary reason for the delay in delivering Apple Intelligence, which is now expected to launch as late as 2026.

Poor leadership might be holding Apple back in the AI race

Without a doubt, ChatGPT by OpenAI is currently the most widely used AI application globally. A massive influx of one million new users occurred within an hour following the release of its ChatGPT-4o image generator – this event led to a surge of Studio GhIbli-inspired memes on social media platforms.

In February 2025, it was found that the number of daily visits to ChatGPT significantly outpaced Microsoft Copilot’s monthly visits. To give a sense of the scale, in the United States alone, ChatGPT attracted over 52 times more visitors than Copilot did in an entire month, with approximately 173.3 million daily visits compared to Copilot’s 98.9 million monthly traffic.

According to Information, several ex-Apple employees from the AI and machine learning team, led by John Giannandrea (Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI strategy) at Apple, have criticized his leadership abilities. They claim that these skills negatively impacted the execution of plans in this division.

They also noted that the leadership showed little enthusiasm for venturing into risky innovations when it comes to developing future iterations of Siri. Due to the slow approach taken by the company in its AI strategy, those working on the upgraded voice assistant have been given an unofficial nickname by other engineers within the organization – “AIMLess,” which is a humorous blend of the division’s name, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Previous Apple employees often describe Siri as a “passed-around item” that various departments have tried to work on, but with minimal progress or enhancement in functionality.

In other locations, Apple has faced scrutiny for advertising what seems to be “vaporware” through Apple Intelligence demo videos. Critics argue that the company has fallen short of its grand golden-braided pledge, primarily providing minimal features such as Writing Tools and Image Playground.

As a result, the company is now facing legal action due to allegations that it ran misleading Apple Intelligence advertisements to boost iPhone 16 sales. The lawsuit claims that these actions contravened several false advertising regulations and consumer protection laws.

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2025-04-16 14:09