Siri turf wars, Apple's inner turmoil: Report

Siri is widely derided within Apple due to Apple's reluctance to loosen its stance on user privacy and organization issues.

A new report from The Information sheds light on what seems to have gone wrong with Apple's Siri voice assistant and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Over three dozen former Siri employees claim that by 2018, the team had "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments."

Because Apple's strict stance on privacy prevented them from developing analytical tools for Siri, engineers often worked without usage metrics for the voice assistant.

As well, they said that the data collected from the company's data science and engineering team was useless and a waste of time and money.

According to reports, some Apple employees decided to leave the company to work for competitors like Google or OpenAI because they believed Apple was too conservative with AI and Large Language Models (LLM).

In fact, Apple executives have rejected proposals to make Siri capable of conducting in-depth conversations, claiming they would be too difficult to manage.

Rather than AI-generated responses, Tim Cook and other executives requested the assistant's responses be written by a team of 20 writers.

A Siri overhaul project codenamed 'Blackbird' was launched in 2019 in order to make the assistant more lightweight and run most of its functions on the device instead of uploading data to the cloud.

Early demos of the project seemed to have impressed the Apple employees, but unfortunately Blackbird was competing with another project called 'Siri X' which eventually won out.