Mark Gurman has published the latest tell-all about Apple’s failure to claim a seat at the artificial intelligence big boy table. The more I read about this, the more it becomes clear that failure here has many fathers. Some of Apple’s leadership apparently didn’t see the underlying technology as relevant. Some didn’t want to spend the money. Others just didn’t make it a priority. For all of these reasons, there’s a ton of innovation happening right now in artificial intelligence, and Apple is responsible for none of it.
At this point, I’m much less interested in how Apple got into this position and much more interested in how they intend to get out of it. Apple remains a massive company with tremendous resources, and in my opinion, it’s not too late to turn this battleship around. I still think Apple’s idea for artificial intelligence, as expressed last year at WWDC, makes sense: refine AI into genuinely useful tools that consumers want, and combine that with private, on-device data to give users something truly unique.
But the question that I first asked last June still remains unanswered: Does Apple have the AI chops to actually make this happen? So far, it appears they don’t. There’s been a recent management shuffle, with Mike Rockwell now in charge of Siri, but the jury’s still out on whether this will be enough.
I’m hoping that the combination of leadership changes and a very public black eye will finally give Apple the push it needs to deliver something remarkable in AI. At the end of the day, Apple’s users—myself included—are waiting to see if the company can make good on its promise to deliver thoughtful, private, and genuinely helpful artificial intelligence.