Apple is facing some intense scrutiny after yet again flubbing its AI tech.
During the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday, the company showed off its latest vision for "Apple Intelligence," a suite of tools that use machine learning to scan images for objects or smush emojis together to form custom Franken-reacts — cutesy ideas that fall vastly short of the ambition of competitors in the space like OpenAI.
The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern sat down with Apple's software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak following the event, and the execs squirmed trying to explain why a smarter Siri assistant — once the vanguard of consumer-facing AI and now dustbin junk compared to products like ChatGPT — is still missing in action.
That's despite some big promises. During last year's WWDC, Apple showed off a "more personal Siri" that promised huge new capabilities for the assistant built on generative AI. But by March, the company had pulled an iPhone 16 ad that made huge promises for the tech, admitting that a more advanced Siri was "going to take us longer than we thought."
In the year 2025, Siri is still a barely usable way to start timers or send somebody a quick iMessage, massively overshadowed by AI models that can analyze research papers,