For those who came in late, Apple missed the AI race and is still in the changing room trying to put on its underpants. This has not sat well with those in the tech press who have made a career out of giving the company free advertising—after all, you can only do so much when everyone knows you are just writing stories about vapourware.
What started as a flashy WWDC 2023 promise has since collapsed into a confused mess of delays, demos that didn’t match reality, and internal turf wars between teams led by Apple AI head John Giannandrea and software chief Craig Federighi.
A report from The Information sheds new light on what went wrong. It paints a picture of a divided house worthy of a Tale of Two Cities or Romeo and Juliet without all that teen sex.
Giannandrea’s team was cautious and fixated on building in-house, privacy-first models, while Federighi’s crew was off experimenting with outside tech like OpenAI’s GPT. As a result, Apple ended up with an Apple Intelligence reveal that looked slick on tape but was practically vapourware behind the scenes.
Unlike the Vision Pro reveal, which had hands-on demos the same day, Siri’s new brain was nowhere to be found. Post-event demos were limp. The intelligent assistant meant to look into your iPhone and apps and take real action was nowhere near ready.
And it gets worse. Federighi's team reportedly staged parts of that WWDC keynote without looping in Siri’s actual engineers.
It’s since emerged that Apple’s AI leadership is shifting under Federighi, whose team appears far more open to plugging in third-party LLMs. Amazon, Samsung, and even the Software King of the World have taken the same strategy. Microsoft threw its lot in with OpenAI and got Bing AI and Copilot out the door while Job’s Mob was still chasing internal consensus.
The real issue here lies with CEO Tim Cook. Cook boxed Apple into a corner by betting the farm on privacy while his rivals built faster and dirtier. Now, he’s relying on Federighi and Vision Pro lead Mike Walker to chart a new AI path, one that might just get Siri where it was supposed to be—two years late.