Despite this, Apple was attracted by then-CEO Steve Jobs. “This is Steve’s last deal,” Siri co-founder Tom Gruber told Wired. “He personally participated in all phases of the deal, negotiated with the deal, and followed to ensure we were successful at Apple after they bought us.”
But other Apple executives nearby at the time painted a picture of a very flawed digital assistant that never really outweighed Apple’s job selling us. Early Siri works, but only in highly limited functional silos.
“What we got was a demonstration of a few people, but it wouldn’t expand to our user base…The initial Siri implementation was a lot of smoke and mirrors behind,” former Apple executor Richard Williamson made such a long visit to the Museum of Computer History in a 2017 interview involving changes in costumes.
“This idea of AI is not AI…it’s a mess,” Williamson said. “It’s very easy to cheat Siri. Without NLP [natural language processing]no context of words. It’s just a keyword matching. ”
But now, even with AI, Siri is reportedly unable to rely on actual work when facing real-world use. The key question is why? Chatbot technology may not be fully mature, but at least it is common to use non-technical daily use on competing platforms.
A confusing factor: Apple’s approach to these things may not be close to the norm. You need to hand over a lot of data comfortably to get Alexa to the best of its kind, and Openai’s Sam Altman seems happy to destroy the entire job on the altar of progress. But Tim Cook and Apple? A cleaner, more positive image has been part of the company’s appeal for decades, including a very privacy focus.
“There is a good excuse [Apple] Wait, that is you do see privacy and data management values as divine rights. and [Apple] It does say such words,” Gruber said.
“If they really think it’s a top priority, they may have conflicts of interest. If they send all the queries to Openai and give them all the possible OpenAI needs, but then they give up their privacy guarantees.”
Over the years, people have also viewed privacy focus as the reason why Siri never felt the benefits of her like Google Assistant. It doesn’t seem too smart, not too natural, because it literally knows little about you. No matter how real that is, it is also part of the root cause of the problem in this new Siri.
A two-half story
The upcoming Siri is based on two core components. Small language models run on the iPhone itself, while more complex queries are offloaded to OpenAI. You must grant a telephone license to do so.
It is estimated that Apple’s IPHONE AI system consists of about 3 billion parameters, some of which are estimated to place OpenAI’s GPT-4 parameters at $1.8 trillion, which is six million times the number. DeepSeek puts headlines into a more efficient lean AI model in early 2025, but still includes the reported 671 billion parameters.
