Apple CEO Presses Software Chief to Pursue More Ambitious AI Strategy

When my phone is sitting on my countertop and I say "hey siri, add eggs to my shopping list" I expect it to add eggs to my shopping list, as it has done so for years, instead of saying "you'll need to unlock your iPhone first."

When I'm driving my car merging onto the highway and I see furniture on the ramp, and I say "hey siri, call the local non emergency police department number" so that I can report it, I expect it to say something like "I have the [city name] non-emergency phone number, want me to call now?" Instead of it saying "calling the New Jersey police department" which is halfway across the continent from me, and then giving me no way to hang up the phone hands free forcing me to grab my phone from the console and quickly try to hang it up while I'm driving at highway speeds.

I’m kinda in agreement with Federighi on these concerns. Though he hasn’t delivered on software quality (from my perspective), I believe it’s good to have someone who keeps these concerns in mind (not necessarily SVP of software).

I tried Siri AI on iPhone recently thinking that it’d be great. I found that Siri AI can’t even navigate to a given URL to get look up information (the response was, “I can’t access specific web pages”). At this point, it seems like Siri AI is probably good for accessing/working with some data on the iDevice and/or doing research on the web.

Siri AI to me when I asked what it is even good for:

“I can help with a wide variety of tasks on your device. I can help you draft emails and messages, set reminders, create calendar events, and find information from the web. I can also help you organize text, perform calculations, and manage your smart home accessories.”

The software chief who pushed out the previous AI chief (who wasn’t enthused by LLMs) must move out for Apple’s AI…and even its own consumer release software…to improve.

So I disabled it and rely on normal Siri again because somehow it’s better.

> better integrated with its technology than the competition

And even this is looking more like short-term relief than a lasting advantage, and in a lot of countries they've already exhausted that option.

That said, I could see there being a free Siri, and a paid for version that is far more powerful. Add it into Apple One? It's also worth noting here that I'm over caring whether this runs on device, I care more than it works.

Rather than making posts/threats about how they're going to ramp up their permissions systems even further... instead they should be scrambling to turn a conversation with your phone a first class interface, otherwise people will discover tools that live outside the Apple ecosystem and then people will gradually move away from it (I can't see them actually opening it up unfortunately). This will quickly become an existential threat to them, because as great as the iPhone is.. if it doesn't fully work with a user's AI agent(s) it will be a problem for Apple.

Software and ceiling-less capitalism are at odds with each other.

Not before time. Apple's software is a bland directionless nothingscape compared to the hardware.

That absolute power fetish begun in second Trump term and didn’t seem to age well.

Do they expect any of those czars to kill any of their children to protect their position?

Fair enough, some of US czars actually had their private firing squads. And they did kill people at their will. And remained unpunished.

But for the love of the people I wouldn’t bow to people like Bovino in a tech article.

Anyways, I can’t imagine that’s what US people want.

For platforms like instagram, you can use it to drive way more ad revenue and it sorts itself out, as described here: https://x.com/firesidealpha/status/2107082123215810862

What is the equivalent for iOS/iCloud?

I feel like everything I read about Apple's AI strategy is full of these kind of "huh?" moments. How can someone who wants Apple to pursue an "Ambitious AI Strategy" simultaneously believe that the software org can produce meaningful multi-year roadmaps right now?

First they did an ad for Apple Intelligence and Siri. Then two years silence. Then they launched it, it’s worse than it was before, not available in the EU and they use models from other companies.