Gurman: No Smart Siri from Apple Anytime Soon

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg has reported on Apple’s struggling AI efforts, sharing insights into the company’s internal challenges and future plans.

What Went Wrong?

According to Gurman, the optimism that followed John Giannandrea’s appointment as head of Apple’s AI division has faded seven years later. In the spring of 2025, Giannandrea was removed from his leadership role overseeing Apple Intelligence and Siri.

The reason? Apple’s existing AI solutions have fallen behind, especially compared to advancements like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last year, Apple announced its AI initiative, Apple Intelligence, branding it as “AI for everyone” and introducing a new Siri version with AI integration. The company claimed that the iPhone 16 was "built from the ground up" for Apple Intelligence. This announcement caused Apple’s stock to soar. However, when the device finally hit the shelves, the promised AI features were either missing or incomplete. Some major updates only arrived the following March.

The AI-powered Siri was initially scheduled for April. But after iOS 18.4 beta testing a few weeks before the release, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi found that many features simply didn’t work on his iPhone, including voice-activated license number lookups. As a result, the AI Siri rollout was delayed to May, and now indefinitely. This led to class-action lawsuits accusing Apple of misleading advertising.

What’s Next?

• The new AI-powered Siri, even a year after its announcement, won’t be ready for WWDC 2025. Instead, Apple will likely focus on updating Apple Intelligence itself rather than promising specific new features.
• The company plans to curb premature marketing of features that are not fully developed, to avoid setting unrealistic expectations.

• One example of misleading promotion involved actress Bella Ramsey from HBO’s “The Last of Us” series asking Siri about a guy she met at a café. The assistant quickly provided an answer — a feature that turned out to be non-existent. After the delay was announced, Apple pulled the ad.
• The main technical problem lies in integrating AI with the existing Siri infrastructure, which led to multiple errors, making it impossible to catch up with competitors.

Within Apple, the situation has sparked frustration:

Some functions of Apple Intelligence are already on the market, and plans for wider language support are in place. However, according to Tim Cook, the AI-powered Siri still needs more time to meet Apple’s quality standards:

There’s not a lot of other reason for it. It’s just taking a bit longer than we thought.

Significant leadership changes followed these setbacks: Siri and other AI-related teams were removed from Giannandrea’s oversight. One senior software developer noted that persuading Federighi to take AI seriously had always been a challenge:
“A lot of it just went ignored.”

While Apple has acquired several small AI startups, it missed out on acquiring Mobileye Global Inc. for $4 billion in 2017, which was later bought by Intel for $15 billion. Integrating Mobileye could have significantly boosted Apple’s autonomous driving and computer vision capabilities.

Despite these setbacks, Giannandrea remained focused on tech rather than marketing. Insiders argue that he should have been more aggressive in securing funding and making strategic moves.

Giannandrea, however, believes that much of the blame lies with Apple’s marketing and advertising teams for creating hype around unfinished features. As a result, there’s growing internal support for halting premature feature promotion.