Gruber just had some choice words related to Apple’s fumbling of Apple Intelligence and Siri improvements. He’s not so much angered (his choice of word) by the delay as by what he claims was effectively fraud.
The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos…
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.
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
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You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.
Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
Sure looks to me like Gruber is saying Apple played us.
Or the well-briefed and deep insider Gruber is sympathetic to certain voices within the company, it has the feel of internal strife, perhaps a push on Giannandrea. If there was some unity I think the messages he would be getting would focus on the challenges a deep, personalized Siri faces with issues of confidentiality, privacy etc, pace of development change, ie issues emerging as testing unfolded. Which I am sure there are anyway.
In terms of the ‘state of the company’ which Gruber uses this to open things up, whether it’s a disconnected Cook or a complacency emerging with all the success, he has a point. The company has not been design/product led for a long time and marketing and corporate appear to be the ones in the driver’s seat, revealed here with this crisis.
If they weren’t ready and they still put it out there it was coming, that was panic at the top.
Pitchbook said that 60% of VC capital in the US last year went into AI ventures. Unreal. And Apple clearly behind the field on various fronts, they must be feeling the heat. I can’t believe the level of quality in Perplexity Pro Deep Research, and that’s a consumer level app. I wonder what the top researchers in Apple are showing the management team as to what’s possible.
The stakes are high and a flub, a Siri that’s a joke in comparison to the competition, is exactly what will kill the credibility stock Gruber talks about.