Why did Apple go "quiet" in the latest round of ChatGPT trends?

The answer has surfaced even further.

Internal team confusion, slow decision-making, and clunky code have all become reasons that slow down Apple AI's faster progress.

The most direct manifestation of this can be seen in Siri.

This is probably the entrance of most ordinary people to know the AI assistant, is the iPhone heyday launched the king bomb function; many people understand ChatGPT, also can not help but take it to do reference.

But after comparing, you will find that today's Siri is completely incomparable to ChatGPT in terms of intelligence.

There is even the news that "Apple's internal staff dislikes Siri".

Why is this situation now?

Three AI engineers from Apple to Google, revealed more details.

Management chaos, slow iteration

These three AI engineers are not small.

Their change is said to have alarmed Google CEO Splinter and Apple CEO Cook. The former was overjoyed by the news and reportedly made personal overtures to the three; the latter tried to retain them, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

They originally came from Google, then left to set up the AI company Laserlike, which focuses on personalized search engines and is dedicated to AI development. It was later acquired by Apple, with the intention of helping Apple develop its search engine.

Last November, the three were revealed to have left Apple and returned to Google.

At that time ChatGPT has not been released, the outside world's attention is still focused on the Apple search engine will be where to go. The specific reasons for leaving the job is unknown.

Now, the main character unveiled the mystery: because they think Google is a better place to develop LLM.

Apple is now severely hampered in Siri and AI development due to too much caution and internal organizational chaos.
As per claims, the Siri team has been in disarray since 2018.

The main reason for this is competitive friction between senior leaders and heated discussions over where to go with the AI assistant.

Siri team leaders didn't want to invest too much money in analyzing Siri usage. Engineers also had no way to know more details about Siri usage, such as how many users actually use Siri and how often they use it.

But the Siri data from the data analysis team, and pressed not to be used.

Some of the departing employees bluntly said, "Isn't this a waste of time and money?

The deeper problem is reflected in the technical development and judgment.

In the New York Times article, the engineer responsible for improving Siri said that the Siri database contains a huge list of words, including 24 linguistic expressions for various music artists, restaurants and other locations.

He described it as a "big snowball," and if you wanted to add a word to the database, it would be crammed into a huge pile of content. This leads to simple phrase updates that require rebuilding the entire database, which can take up to six weeks. If it is a complex function, long as a year is also very likely.

This means Siri can't be a creative AI assistant like ChatGPT, the engineer said.

It is reported that Apple executives rejected the proposal to allow Siri to conduct long conversations because it would lead to Siri conversations are difficult to control and "very fancy".

This, coupled with Apple's uncompromising stance on privacy and security, makes it a huge challenge to further improve Siri's capabilities. On the contrary, OpenAI will collect user chat to train the model to improve the effect.

At the same time, to prevent Siri from "babbling", Apple's preferred route is to have the human team pre-write Siri's responses, rather than using AI to generate them.

For example, ask Siri what the price of an iPhone is. It will not reply positively, but will only give a link to the official website.

Contradictions arose from this.

Siri's design team demanded that its response accuracy needed to be close to perfect before the feature went live. Engineers spent months trying to convince them that not every question needed to be verified manually, which would have limited the range of questions Siri could answer.

The Apple design team also repeatedly refused to allow users to give feedback on Siri's answers to questions, resulting in the development team being unable to understand the limitations of the model.

In contrast, ChatGPT allows users to give comments on each answer, which are critical for model optimization.

In 2019, as if to make a change, the Siri team has developed a smart assistant codenamed "Blackbird".

It can be thought of as a lighter version of Siri, allowing app developers to create features on top of it and run it natively on the iPhone, which also provides better performance and privacy.

The demo of Blackbird was said to be good and at least the internal employees were excited to see it.

But that's when problems between the teams came up again.

It was said that some executives wanted to push a project codenamed "Siri X", which was created for two main reasons: first, to commemorate Siri's 10th anniversary; and second, to better protect privacy and security.

Then hundreds of employees from the Blackbird team were transferred to the new project, and Blackbird was never completed.

In 2021, Siri X was completed, allowing many of the voice assistant's functions to be handled locally.

After all of the above, Siri has come to 2023.

Discontent with Siri has reportedly emerged within Apple, from the equally scrutinized MR team.

Sources close to the situation, including the team leader Mike Rockwell (Mike Rockwell) after looking at the effect of Siri control headset devices, have expressed disappointment. And had once considered developing other methods to replace Siri, but eventually gave up the idea.