Delays cast a cloud over Apple Intelligence
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Apple's acknowledgment that AI enhancements to Siri are taking longer than expected has increased concern that the iPhone maker is falling further behind in what is shaping up to be a tectonic shift for the tech industry.
Why it matters: When it announced Apple Intelligence last June, Apple was already trailing major competitors in outlining its AI strategy.
Driving the news: Apple confirmed earlier this month that the enhanced Siri was taking longer than expected, with features that were due imminently now expected to arrive "in the coming year."
- With delivery times up in the air, Apple took down the video of a 2024 ad touting Siri's new AI features.
- Since then, there have been concerns expressed in and outside the company that Apple may have trouble reaching even these revised goals.
- Bloomberg has reported that Apple executives called the delay "ugly" and "embarrassing" in a meeting with worried staffers.
Between the lines: While Apple has shipped the first pieces of Apple Intelligence, what have yet to arrive are the components that really made the strategy compelling — the notion of combining AI smarts with personal data in a secure and privacy-preserving way.
- The features that Apple has delivered — custom emoji, Image Playground, writing help and ChatGPT integration — fit more in the nice-to-have bucket. And, in some cases, those features still lag behind what's available from others.
- The features that are delayed, meanwhile, are the ones that generated the most excitement during last year's demo.
- For example, Apple showed Siri answering "when does my mom's flight land?" by drawing upon various pieces of knowledge across the system within multiple apps. That ability to understand personal relationships and context and retrieve personal information was what made Apple Intelligence stand out from rivals.
The big picture: While Apple has struggled with its AI efforts, the industry is barreling forward with unprecedented speed.
- Even Amazon, which has had its own set of challenges, announced in February its plans for Alexa+, an AI-infused upgrade to its voice assistant.
- On the personalization front, Google last week debuted an option for users to integrate their search history with Gemini, and Microsoft managed at long last to ship its Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs.
- And the whole industry has added new techniques that have leapfrogged what chatbots could do last year. Among those are reasoning models, semi-autonomous agents and the ability to do deep research.
What they're saying: Industry observers have been pulling no punches in describing what the delay could mean for Apple's future. Daring Fireball's John Gruber thrashed Apple, arguing that not only is the company late with AI, but it has now broken its long, enviable record of only promoting products when they are ready to ship.
- "The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI," Gruber wrote. "It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen."
- "The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true, and they set a course based on that."
