The paywalled report explains that former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have held back Siri and Apple's AI efforts. The virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside Apple for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time.
By 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." Siri's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse Siri's usage, and engineers were in the dark about basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so.
Many Apple employees on these teams purportedly left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, including large-language models. Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals give Siri the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be gimmicky and hard to control. The company's uncompromising stance on privacy has also proven challenging for enhancing Siri, with Apple pushing for more of the virtual assistant's functions to be performed on-device.
In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed "Blackbird." The effort sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers, and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness.
Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed "Siri X" for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri's processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the ambitious modular functionality of Blackbird.
Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X, which killed the more ambitious project. Siri X was mostly completed in 2021 and now many of the voice assitant's functions are processed locally.
The group working on Apple's mixed reality headset were reportedly disappointed by the demonstrations provided by the Siri team on how the virtual assistant could control the headset. At one point in the device's development, the headset team considered building an alternative method for controlling the device using voice commands because Siri was deemed to be unsatisfactory.
The report also notes that engineers who helped Apple modernize its search technology left the company to work on the type of large-language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT at Google. Tim Cooks personally attempted to persuade the team to stay at Apple.
More to follow...
Tags: Siri, The Information
This article, "Report Details Turmoil Behind Apple's AI Efforts, 'Siri X,' and Headset Voice Controls" first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums
source https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-behind-siri-and-apple-ai/
0 Comments