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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#201

Post by margorczynski »

xvector wrote: post #87
LoganDark wrote: post #5

Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs? I get that they're a hardware company, but surely that can't be the full story. They must be suffering from some case of extreme perfectionism or something like that. I would assume it'd be very difficult to get an LLM to perform consistently and reliably without making it useless.

They refuse to pony up for competent talent in ML. Meta, OpenAI, and others out-compensate Apple for ML talent by a factor of 2-4x.

From what I'm seeing all those companies now have problems explaining to investors when they'll see any returns on all that investment.

Especially after China has entered the game and DeepSeek disintegrating most of the moat that existed around those companies.

And Apple can simply use what others created instead of burning billions into R&D which might not come up with anything noteworthy.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#202

Post by scarface_74 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #193
ramesh31 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? It died 14 years ago.

I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too. I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became. Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.

You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt?

Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#203

Post by veidr »

gadders wrote: post #200

David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails/37 Signals) has been writing about the state of Apple AI on LinkedIn recently (as well as an additional post that was deleted for using the word "asshole"): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...

LOL I did not click the links because I don't want to visit that site (and also have limited interest in what DHH says about Apple Intelligence — not none, but not enough to click it), but I am actually very curious as to why DHH (or anyone, but especially someone like him, with many other places to opine) would post his opinions on LinkedIn of all places...?

Can anybody square that circle?

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#204

Post by TwoPhonesOneKid »

ethbr1 wrote: post #101
ForTheKidz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

At the end of the day, personal context is king for useful AI. Which means Google or Apple. Or Microsoft on the business side. Nobody sane is going to share all their personal data (about everything) with a fly-by-night random AI app/company. Apple has time, in the same way it did with Maps, because despite the marketing push no one is buying phones solely because of AI features these days. They're still an "Oh, that…

> Nobody sane is going to share all their personal data (about everything) with a fly-by-night random AI app/company.

They absolutely will if the tech giants refuse to work with each others' data silos.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#205

Post by scarface_74 »

dhx wrote: post #199
alexpotato wrote: post #164

I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…

Obviously a made up scenario because systems engineering (as the discipline most likely to be involved in the provided scenario) is all about balancing competing requirements and dealing with design constraints such as available choice of materials, or acceptable cost to consumers, or any other number of criteria. Systems engineers would have responded by informing this hypothetical Steve Jobs that if he wanted to ma…

He actually publicly did just this with the first iPhone. At introduction in January 2007 it had a plastic screen. He noticed the screen scratched easily in his pocket and they moved to a glass screen (and announced it) before it shipped in July.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#206

Post by mapmap »

scarface_74 wrote: post #198
JKCalhoun wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that the last Major OS release was going to be a bug fix release ... but then AI happened. And imagine this happens every year with some new feature demanding it be shipped. Having said that, here's the reality of bugs that are assigned to a team. Feature work comes first. The (older) engineers don't want this — they want to fix bugs, refactor code, get rid of tech debt. But ever since Jobs returned to Apple,…

> But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features Were you using Macs before Jobs came back? The entire operating system for PowerPC based Macs was technical debt with parts of the OS running under emulation. It was a buggy unreliable crash prone mess.

>Were you using Macs before Jobs came back?

I think he was :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(video_game)

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#207

Post by basisword »

samtheprogram wrote: post #167
diggan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it. Well, apparently some people have at least some expectations, after Apple pushed ads touting Siri's new abilities (and Apple AI) but failed to launch them on time, and now Apple been hit with a federal lawsuit against them: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertisin...

I’m one of them. I saw demos at _last year’s_ WWDC that I’ve been excited to get. And now with this announcement I don’t think that will happen before this year’s event.

Never mind this year's event - it's going to be multiple years before they have something of the quality they 'demoed' last year. They rushed some great concept videos and then thought they could actually build them in less than a year. And sold $1k+ devices based on it. I'd honestly say this is a bigger disaster than Apple Maps. At least in that case they were forced into doing something really big really quick (because Google was crippling the iOS Maps app). In this case Apple didn't need to do any AI. Absolutely nothing they have shipped is useful or innovative. It's one of the rare times they've followed the market instead of waiting to do it right. At the minute, it's not any better than the co-pilot rubbish MS have shoved into Windows.

Edit: I wonder if this will force them back to live events? Live demos are at least more believable and might win them back some trust.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#208

Post by veidr »

lapcat wrote: post #174
JimDabell wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else…

> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS…

Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere.

And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use.

However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (that yes, ran Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1[1] for the last decade of its service life) until 2021 for a bunch of long-timeline server functions, so I guess Snow Leopard was pretty good overall, in the end...

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/106449

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#209

Post by basisword »

programmertote wrote: post #177
alexpotato wrote: post #164

I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…

Not relevant to what you are discussing related to attention to detail (which I agree with). This is my imaginary scenario -- if Steve Jobs were to tell me in a meeting, "I see air bubbles coming out of the phone", I (as an engineer) would reply to him, "Dude, that air is carrying excess heat out of the phone via convection. If you don't leave any space in between hot electronic components, your phone will be a toast…

It's fine to explain why it is the way it is, but at the end of the day that's still just an engineering problem you need to try and solve. Sometimes Apple made mis-steps in that size/heat scenario but they've done it a hell of a lot better than anyone else for a long time. Sometimes you need demanding product types to force you to put serious effort into an engineering challenge you don't deem worthwhile.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#210

Post by tehlike »

ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

Failing up is surprisingly common
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