‘Hey Siri: Explain how internal feuding at Apple left the company losing the AI race’

A damning expose of Apple's missteps trying upgrade Siri delivers a masterclass on how competing teams build resentment inside a company. — AFP

Developing a legacy digital assistant into a cutting-edge example of AI isn’t easy – just ask Amazon, which has hit numerous delays in modernising its venerable but technically dim Alexa system.

Apple has stumbled in the same way, and recently it had to confess, embarrassingly, that its development team had encountered difficulties and it had to delay the launch of some impressive features it already announced would be part of its upgraded AI-centric Siri assistant.

But a damning new leak from industry news site The Information suggests that it was more than tech issues that left Apple far behind peers like OpenAI or Google. Mismanagement allowed a strange form of infighting to flourish among the tech giant’s research teams, and the effects of this internal strife offer a great lesson for any company trying to develop a new product or complete a large project.

Over half a dozen former workers in Apple’s AI and machine learning section spoke to The Information about the problems in making a smarter Siri, and laid the blame squarely on poor leadership. They cited a lack of vision about grasping how peer companies were innovating, a damaging emphasis on improving small features rather than pushing for radical design overhauls, and inter-team rivalries between within the company.

The news outlet says that former AI leader John Giannandrea apparently didn’t believe chatbots, exemplified by ChatGPT, were useful. He told his staff this in 2022.

Meanwhile, in 2023 Apple managers told software engineers they couldn’t build in AI models from other companies into final products, even through it was clear to the teams that Apple’s AIs just “didn’t perform nearly as well as OpenAI’s technology,” MacRumors notes. And even as it became clear that OpenAI and other big tech names were racing ahead, the Siri team leader Robby Walker was reportedly focused on achieving “small wins” like improving the response speed of Siri instead of making its AI more sophisticated.

Walker was particularly criticised by his colleagues and, The Information said, wasn’t bold enough to “take big risks on Siri” instead focusing on “metrics that didn’t move the needle much on its performance, rather than having a grand vision for overhauling the voice assistant”.

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Apart from these leadership slips, inter-team rivalries reared their ugly heads. Some workers in the software engineering team were frustrated that colleagues in the AI group were getting higher pay, faster promotions and they seemed able to take longer vacations and even work short Friday hours.

The disparities sowed mistrust, and some teams extensively documented their own efforts on joint projects so that if the project failed, the blame would fall on the other team.

The Information also said Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, has built up his own team of “hundreds” of machine-learning coders – an effort that sounds like it duplicates expertise and tasking elsewhere in Apple, and which may risk deepening internal rivalries.

Why should you care about this? It is an example of a strange form of infighting inside Apple, yet the iPhone maker is a trillion-dollar, global enterprise that may seem to have few similarities to any small company. But the way that different teams inside Apple resented each other is telling, and it’s something you can avoid in your own company by being open and fair in rewarding staff with pay and perks. 

Keeping team leaders both focused on the necessary details to succeed as well as cultivating current knowledge and awareness of big sea changes in the industry that may require them to overhaul their thinking are good ideas. And doing both at once is something Apple’s Siri team seems to have struggled at. Perhaps the wrong things kept being discussed at regular update meetings. 

If a project really does go wrong, though, then one successful Apple lesson you can probably follow is appointing a new team lead: News site MacRumors says Apple staff are now pretty confident that Federighi and another expert can actually turn Siri development around. Federighi seems conscious of the slipups and urgency, and has told the Siri coders to do “whatever it takes” to make the AI better. – Inc/Tribune News Service