In a recent report on Apple's AI strategy, tech journalist Mark Gurman extensively described numerous strategic missteps in the apple Intelligence project.

Gurman stated that Apple is unlikely to spend much time discussing Siri at this year's WWDC, including future upgrades and features announced (but later delayed) at last year's WWDC.

The report mentioned that Apple's software chief, Craig Federighi, is not particularly convinced about artificial intelligence. He has expressed "hesitation" over the significant investments in this technology and does not consider it a "core capability."

Apple Intelligence is an AI initiative launched by Apple, first unveiled at the WWDC developer conference in June 2024, which announced integration with ChatGPT. The project aims to provide deeply integrated intelligent features for devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, enhancing user experience through system-level intelligence.

Regarding Apple Intelligence, Gurman listed the following strategic missteps:

• Excessive disagreements among executives, with AI head John Giannandrea struggling to integrate into the core decision-making circle.
• Systemic conflicts between the old and new Siri. Apple initially believed that layering generative AI onto the old Siri was the fastest way to catch up, but employees described it as a game of whack-a-mole- solving one problem only to see three new ones emerge, ultimately delaying the rollout of new Siri features.
• Overly aggressive marketing. Apple prematurely promoted unripe features like cross-app contextual understanding, leading to multiple promised deliverables being delayed.

Surrounding Apple Intelligence, Apple may introduce some "unremarkable" updates, such as adding more Apple Intelligence features to other apps, introducing an AI-powered battery optimization tool, or launhing the virtual health coach Project Mulberry.

Apple's AI Dilemma: Executive Disagreements Lead to Decision-Making Gridlock

Reviewing Apple's progress in recent years, the much-anticipated Apple AI has not only failed to gain unanimous support from executives but has also delivered underwhelming results.

As mentioned earlier, Apple's software chief, Federighi, is the "helmsman" of Apple's software ecosystem. Since 2012, he has overseen Apple's software engineering department, reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook and managing the development and strategic planning of all Apple operating systems (iOS, macOS, watchOS, etc.).

It was he who gathered senior employees in 2018 to announce a major hire: the company had just poached John Giannandrea from Google, now Apple's head of AI operations.

Giannandrea previously served as Google's senior vice president of search and AI, leading the company's strategic shift from "Mobile First" to "AI First," which directly influenced Google's core technological direction.

The two, who should have been working in tandem, have significant disagreements over AI strategy.

In Federighi's view, AI would consume resources without delivering tangible returns. According to several colleagues, he does not consider AI a core function of personal computers or mobile devices. This attitude only changed slightly after OpenAI's ChatGPT emerged in late 2022. However, he still argued internally that OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others did not pose an urgent threat, insisting that users wanted an assistant to control devices rather than a ChatGPT-like chatbot.

Several executives shared Federighi's stance. "In the world of AI, you don't really know what the product is until you've finished investing," said another senior executive. "That's not how Apple thinks. When Apple sits down to develop a product, it already knows the end goal."

The report also noted that while some executives were "convinced" AI would have a "revolutionary" impact, they couldn't persuade Federighi, with many suggestions "falling on deaf ears."

As the former head of Google's search and AI division, Giannandrea seems to have never fully integrated into Apple's inner circle, unable to secure sufficient budget for his team with a strong stance. Upon joining Apple, he believed the company needed to invest far more in AI than it currently was, but his efforts were "often blocked."

Against this backdrop, Apple's AI and machine learning teams have been jokingly referred to by some employees as "AI/ML less." Due to repeated delays in Siri features, the team has been stuck in a rut for months. Apple insiders have also complained about its lax work attitude, slowing progress on engineering and new projects. At an all-hands meeting in March, Giannandrea's deputy and former head of Siri, Robby Walker, called the situation "terrible" and "embarrassing."

Previously, it was also reported that Apple planned to adjust Giannandrea's responsibilities, removing him from overseeing the robotics division. Instead, Apple's senior vice president, John Ternus, would handle hardware development for robotics projects.

This was the second responsibility shift for Giannandrea in a month. In March, due to "failing" performance on the Siri project (with the Apple Intelligence Siri release severely delayed), Apple reassigned Giannandrea from the project and transferred the Siri team and its future development to Mike Rockwell, who oversees Vision Pro (Apple's first spatial computing device).

On the technical front, Apple has lagged behind competitors in acquiring key hardware resources like GPUs, slowing the training speed of its AI models.

Earlier, insiders suggested that eight years after Giannandrea merged Apple's AI teams into one, the likelihood of the team disbanding was growing. In the latest report, Gurman stated that Apple executives had considered gradually phasing out Giannandrea but feared his R&D team might leave en masse. However, Giannandrea himself seemed unfazed, reportedly intending to stay and relieved to have passed the hot potato of Siri to someone else.

An Uncertain AI Future

Industry insiders noted that continued failures in AI threaten everything from iPhone dominance to robotics and other future products. Many experts believe that if Apple cannot achieve a breakthrough in AI, its future smart device ecosystem risks being "marginalized." "It's as if Apple's stage is shrinking, falling behind competitors in smart assistants and automation, ceding potentially future-defining technologies," said one authoritative analyst.

Apple is now attempting to adjust its strategy. A key move is a complete overhaul of Siri rather than merely forcing generative AI to coexist with the old version. According to Gurman, Apple's Zurich-based AI team is developing a new architecture entirely based on a large language model engine. Reports from November last year indicated this revamp aims to make the voice assistant more natural and credible, with stronger information integration capabilities.

Another solution involves leveraging the iPhone and differential privacy technology to optimize synthetic data, comparing artificial training data with user email language features on-device and only transmitting anonymized synthetic data back for AI training. Internal discussions also include enabling Siri's internet connectivity to scrape and integrate multi-source data, essentially turning Siri into an AI-powered web search tool similar to Perplexity. Apple is reportedly in talks with Perplexity about an AI search partnership for Safari.