The Siri crisis goes on. A month after Apple announced it would delay Apple Intelligence’s most important feature (on-screen Siri awareness), a report from The Information takes a behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s AI teams, the fake Siri demo at WWDC 2024, and more.
According to Wayne Ma, even with Apple’s reorganized leadership of the Siri team, there has been a lot of drama over the past decade, and making everything work is going to take some time.
Former Apple employees told the journalist that before Siri’s leaders decided to go with a single large model that “could handle everything,” the team wanted to build small and large language models, known as “Mini Mouse” and “Mighty Mouse.” The Mini Mouse would handle everything on-device, while the Mighty Mouse would take advantage of cloud knowledge.
However, the indecision and, eventually, the wrong decision for Siri weren’t the only issues. The report reveals ever-growing tension between John Giannandrea’s and Craig Federighi’s teams. Giannandrea’s team was responsible for making Siri better, while Federighi’s teams were actually doing all the hard work.
Now, with Federighi being in charge of Siri again (the main boss of Siri is actually the Vision Pro leader), The Information shows employees are more confident about this leadership change.
The report also gives us another point of view on Apple’s unusual choice of previewing a nonexistent product during the previous WWDC 2024 keynote. The journalist writes:
“Among members of the Siri team at Apple, though, the demonstration was a surprise. They had never seen working versions of the capabilities, according to a former Apple employee. At the time, the only new feature from the demonstration that was activated for test devices was a pulsing, colorful ribbon that appeared on the edges of the iPhone’s screen when a user invoked Siri, the former employee said.”
With that, another source reveals Apple demoed an inexistent product. Shockingly, the only functional feature was the new Siri design. Besides that, the other features weren’t available at the time.
That said, the new Siri with on-screen awareness capabilities is expected to be released sometime in 2026.
