Apple is stuck in its own philosophy

If Apple wants Siri to truly become a smart virtual assistant, it will be forced to reconsider its stance on privacy. Photo: Landian News .

Apple Intelligence is shaping up to be one of Apple's most disappointing new technologies. Announced at the WWDC developer conference in June 2024, Apple's AI system was rolled out across the iPhone 16 lineup in October and on the iPhone 15 Pro.

Early features like a text-based email-writing tool, a summary tool for impatient readers, and an AI-powered emoji generator added in December have all failed to make a splash. But the centerpiece of Apple’s intelligence, the new Siri, has yet to arrive.

While Amazon has launched Alexa+ with major improvements, the promised Siri has yet to materialize. Apple originally planned to launch the new Siri in April, then postponed it to May. Now, according to Bloomberg , the launch has been postponed indefinitely. Siri is not working as expected.

Promising start but disappointing now

When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence to iPhone users last year, Siri was a “barely usable prototype.” A feature that was supposed to be coming to the iPhone 16 may now have to wait until the iPhone 17.

For a company worth trillions of dollars, it’s hard to believe that the gap between promise and reality is so large. But looking back at Siri’s history, this story is nothing new, Wired noted.

In October 2011, Apple first introduced Siri as a key feature on the iPhone 4S. At the time, the virtual assistant was ahead of the Amazon Echo (launched in 2014) and appeared just one day before Steve Jobs passed away, less than two months after he stepped down as CEO.

When Siri first appeared on the iPhone 4S, it was introduced as a revolutionary product. Photo: Bloomberg.

The Siri introduction video seemed like a technological miracle. Users could talk to the virtual assistant naturally, without having to think about how to phrase things, and get precise, contextual answers. But looking back, that dream has yet to come true 13 years later.

The company hopes that Apple Intelligence will make Siri truly smarter, similar to how modern chatbots work. According to Apple, Siri will be able to understand personal context, perform actions across multiple apps, and have a deep knowledge of the user's device. This is "the beginning of a new era," it said.

But for those who remember Siri from 2011, the promise only served to highlight the gap between expectations and reality. Few people know that Siri was not originally an Apple product.

Siri's fate came to Apple

Siri was originally developed by SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) and DARPA - the research agency of the US Department of Defense. Initially, Siri was a standalone iPhone application. Then, Apple bought it in 2010 for more than 200 million USD .

Videos of the original Siri can still be found on YouTube. At the time, Siri co-founder Tom Gruber tested it by asking Siri to find a romantic Italian restaurant near his office. Not only did Siri show results, but she also helped book a table, all with just her voice.

Steve Jobs believed Siri was an inevitable future. “This was Steve’s last acquisition. He was involved in every step, from negotiating to making sure we were successful at Apple after the acquisition,” Gruber told Wired .

But some Apple executives at the time painted a different picture of Siri. It was a product that was never quite ready.

Siri in 2011 was touted as a quantum leap forward among voice assistants, but was eventually overtaken by Google Assistant. Photo: Bloomberg.

“What we bought was a demo that worked well for a few people, but was completely unscalable to millions of users,” former Apple executive Richard Williamson said in 2017. “Siri had no AI at all, it was a mess. It was incredibly easy to fool. There was no natural language processing (NLP), no context, it was just keyword searching.”

The original Siri failed to live up to expectations. But what’s more worrying is that the Siri of 2025, despite its advanced AI integration, continues to suffer from the same problems.

The two halves of the new Siri

While AI chatbots are becoming more popular, Apple has been unable to get Siri to work as expected. The biggest reason may lie in the company's core philosophy of privacy.

Systems like Alexa and ChatGPT work because they collect large amounts of data from users. But Apple is different. “Apple holds privacy as a sacred principle. If they really put privacy first, they would have a conflict of interest when developing AI,” Gruber said.

Siri has always been considered less intelligent than Google Assistant. Simply because it knows less about the user. Now, that problem is repeated with the new generation of Siri.

According to Wired , the new Siri will rely on two systems, including a small AI model running right on the iPhone and a larger model from OpenAI on the server. Users will have to give permission for Siri to send requests to OpenAI.

The iPhone's AI model is said to have around 3 billion parameters, while OpenAI's GPT4 has 1,800 billion, which is 600 times larger. Even DeepSeek, a much smaller AI, has 671 billion parameters.

The AI ​​model running on the iPhone is too small by current standards. Photo: NurPhoto.

A smaller model means Siri will be severely limited in its ability to understand context and handle complex queries. So what will the new Siri actually be able to do before it has to give up and switch to OpenAI? Will it be any different from virtual assistants like Microsoft Copilot or Amazon Alexa+?

Many of the features Apple is promising for Siri may sound familiar, like controlling settings on your phone. But that’s something Samsung’s Bixby has been doing since 2017, and Bixby has never been seen as a reason to buy a Galaxy phone.

After more than a decade, Siri still isn’t really smart. Unless the company is willing to sacrifice some privacy to improve Siri’s learning and understanding, the dream of a perfect virtual assistant may continue to be delayed indefinitely, Wired concluded.

Source: https://znews.vn/apple-dang-mac-ket-trong-chinh-triet-ly-minh-ton-tho-post1540472.html