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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

#181

Post by stackedinserter »

ed_mercer wrote: post #108
AnonC wrote: post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

Literally the only time I ever use Siri is to set a timer. That is, if I’m lucky and she actually understands me. It’s such an embarrassment in 2025.

Probably there's more, but expectations are so low that I don't even want to try.

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

#182

Post by viraptor »

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…

I really hope it's not true, because that would just mean he doesn't understand how elements are placed on boards - there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter)

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

#183

Post by Spivak »

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…

Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer?

The engineers know that the phone isn't literally a solid brick of electronics and "can't be made smaller" is normal human speak for "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it." The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.

Jobs was very good at his… uhh job but stuff like this isn't an example of it.

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

#184

Post by netcan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #91
netcan wrote: post #79

Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in. From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot. Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dr…

Moravec's Paradox strikes again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Woah!

You have no idea how much "hole" you just filled in my lexicon. Have been articulating this all wrong for years.

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

#185

Post by JKCalhoun »

JimDabell wrote: post #99
AnonC wrote: post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

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…

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, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features.

So, the slippery part is this: once you defer a bug for an OS release and ship your product, deferring that bug in the next OS is a no-brainer. You already shipped with the bug, why is it so important this time around? So users/devs learn to work around the bug.

Occasionally, as an old-timer, I would on a whim just fix an arbitrary bug that was "bugging" me. Sadly though, the process had become so top-down though that I would also need: 1) someone to code-review the changes (and so already you are encountering your first obstacle requiring "buy in") and then 2) get permission from "management" (this might be the BRB, bug review board) in order to submit the fix and the Radar. (There are periods though when they are lax and bugs can be submitted with little justification — or we would just make up some bullshit to get the bug fix in).

I recall the early days with fondness when a dev just checked fixes in.

Me: Craig, are you working on the Crop tool in Photos?

Craig: Yeah, why?

Me: How does it pick the default for whether to use Portrait or Landscape? Half the time I think the default it picks is wrong. Why not look at the image bounds and default to Landscape if it is wider than it is tall?

Craig: Good idea. I'll make the change now and write a Radar for it later.

Also, a shout out to Brendan who would push back when in a feature meeting with something like, "Okay, which of these features can we drop? Because we have some serious technical debt we need to address that was not own your feature list."

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

#186

Post by baggy_trough »

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…

His persistent presence over what can only be called a disaster of the first magnitude is indeed puzzling.

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

#187

Post by MichaelZuo »

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 it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence.

Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019.

From my recollection at least.

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

#188

Post by mplanchard »

ed_mercer wrote: post #108
AnonC wrote: post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

Literally the only time I ever use Siri is to set a timer. That is, if I’m lucky and she actually understands me. It’s such an embarrassment in 2025.

This is also one of my only uses of Siri, and the only one it gets right the large majority of the time. I also try to use it to se reminders in the future, but it’s a crapshoot whether it will get the date and/or reminder text correct.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but I honestly think it was better when it was released years ago than it is today.

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

#189

Post by layer8 »

siva7 wrote: post #58

I'm really buffled what makes it for Apple so difficult to cut off Siri and replace it with state-of-art technology (LLMs). Siri is still akin to a "dumbphone" 4 years into the age of "smartphones" which is a good indicator for a lost case and when it's better to start a product from scratch without the tech debt.

Existing app integrations (SiriKit) might not be easy to migrate.

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

#190

Post by philistine »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #90
datadeft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I would love to have less features in MacOS actually. We are approaching Windows start menu level of crap being installed by default.

The fact Apple Music has notifications advertising it on my lock screen, or splash screens advertising it once a month when I open Music.app would have been unthinkable pre-Tim Cook.

Please for the love of everything, go in Settings and turn it off.

https://www.howtoisolve.com/how-to-turn-off-or-disable-apple...

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