Apple Siri Enhancements Affected by Privacy Concerns, Internal Conflicts; Is AI to Blame?

Apple's Siri is allegedly being halted from getting the enhancements it needs due to internal conflicts and privacy concerns.

Based on the latest reports, Apple's employees who are working on the company's natural-language search processing transition are having lack confidence. Rumors stated that unfortunate events and departures caused this turmoil among Apple staff.

The Information reported that three Apple engineers, who helped Apple modernize its search technology, decided to leave the company and work for Google.

Apple Siri Enhancements are Halted

In 2022, Apple engineers Steven Baker, Anand Shukla, and Srinivasan Venkatachary left Apple since they believed Google was a better company to work with when it came to LLMs (large language models).

LLMs are used to allow chatbots to have the capability to answer questions just like how humans normally answer them.

Their departure drastically affected the AI team of Apple; which is already suffering from numerous issues, as reported by Apple Insider.

Experts stated that Apple is hesitant to implement AI technologies, such as LLMs, because of the problems revolving around them.

For example, ChatGPT is a popular chatbot. However, it is criticized because of its riddling answers and incorrect statements.

Another issue with LLMs that halts Apple from focusing on it is the need for queries to be processed in the cloud.

For the past few years, Apple has been moving Siri's functions on-device so that the privacy of its users can be protected.

Is AI to blame?

Based on the testaments made by Apple employees, AI is not the exact reason why Siri's modernization is hard to achieve. They are blaming Apple's too-conservative approach when it comes to AI technologies.

For example, some Apple executives decided to dismiss proposals to allow Siri to have back-and-forth conversations. They explained that this innovation would be difficult to control.

As of writing, Apple is still quite hesitant when it comes to working on AI technologies.

Only time will tell if the iPhone maker will completely accept the arrival of AIs.

In other news, Apple Books' recent update allowed Japanese readers to have access to vertical manga webtoons. We also reported about the expected arrival of the new Apple Reality Pro headset.

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