AI 시대에도 애플 시리가 여전히 부족한 충격적인 이유!

Back in 2011 when Apple introduced Siri, it was billed as a breakthrough feature for the iPhone.

 I'm really excited to show you Siri.

 What is the weather like today? Here's the forecast for today.

 It is that easy.

 It wasn't perfect, but it was first.

 Siri was a really big deal when it first launched back in 2011, because it was a whole new way to interact with your iPhone.

 This was actually a pet project of Steve Jobs.

 He saw Siri demoed as a separate app before Apple acquired the company, and was just kind of blown away by what Siri could do.

 He really saw the long term vision for this kind of paradigm, where you talk to your devices instead of typing, and at the time it seemed very revolutionary.

 But 15 years after it launched, the voice assistant still mishears things, misses context, and now the rollout of a new and improved Siri has been delayed.

 And last year, the tech giant introduced Apple Intelligence.

 But critics say Apple has not evolved to meet the new AI standards set by OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Amazon's Alexa.

 If you look at everything they announced in WWDC last year, you know a lot of that hasn't come to fruition.

 They've hit a lot of speed bumps.

 Since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, generative AI has taken off.

 Tech giants like Microsoft and Google have centered their strategies around Large Language Models, LLMs, from search to productivity.

 But some say Apple has fallen behind.

 You had ChatGPT, you had Anthropic's Claude, and so many other of these artificial intelligence products coming out there outside of Apple's ecosystem, and Apple still hasn't been able to catch up.

 Apple's stock has also taken a hit.

 Over the past six months, it's fallen more than 16%, while other tech companies like Microsoft and Google have pushed ahead in AI.

 If Apple was as successful in their own pursuits for generative AI as we've seen some of their mega-cap competitors, Apple stock price would be higher than it is today.

 In November 2023, during an interview with CNBC, Apple's hardware leaders insisted the company wasn't falling behind.

 Critics have been surprised that Apple appears to be f alling behind when it comes to AI.

 How do you respond? I don't believe we are.

 Not too worried.

 Not too worried.

 Since that interview, the AI landscape has moved fast and Apple's position in it has only grown more uncertain.

 So, what went wrong with Siri? And can Apple still lead in AI, or is it too late to catch up? While some iPhone users love the latest updates to Siri.

.

.

 The new Siri in iOS 18 is so good.

 The new interface that lights up a rainbow around the edges is so much better, and it reacts to your voice in real time.

 But most importantly, Siri is actually smarter now.

 Others say it's not the way it should be in the age of AI.

 Dear Tim Cook, your Hey Siri does not work.

 On the new iPhones, it does not.

 I need to know if it's only me that is having severe issues with Siri.

 It literally can't spell a sentence correctly.

 Hey Siri, could you send a message please? Hey Siri? Siri isn't really much of an update.

 It kind of sucks.

 For example, is the NBA player Zach LaVine playing tonight? SIRI: Okay- Come on.

 It should be able to tell me instead of bringing up stuff from the web.

 Siri is one where there was so much promise but obviously been very disappointing, especially after that first splash.

 While Siri was groundbreaking in 2011, Apple didn't build on that early lead.

 Over time, the assistant fell behind as rivals launched smarter, faster, more adaptive AI tools.

 There are a number of things that have held Siri back since it launched several years ago, and it didn't take long for competitors to really catch up to what Siri was doing: most notably Amazon with Alexa.

 Apple has traditionally been a hardware company.

 They make great hardware, not so great at the software and services bit of things, and so Siri kind of stayed the same for several years after it first launched.

 Apple's strategy has been focused on building generative AI models into its devices, aiming to make daily tasks easier, but industry watchers say Apple has been reactive and slow to match the moves of rivals like Google and Microsoft.

 In June of 2024, Apple told the world, "Hey, we're going to take this new large language model concept.

 We're going to make Siri more like ChatGPT this year.

" Back just earlier this spring, Apple said, "Oops, we aren't able to do this.

 The product is not where we thought it would be at this point.

" So this was kind of a huge miss, especially as Apple was already perceived to be behind in artificial intelligence.

 So, what slowed Apple down? Experts say missed opportunities in model development and internal fragmentation.

 They're not developing the models in-house and implementing them in-house.

 They're relying on third parties and then following the trend.

 I think by relying on OpenAI or increasingly other players to be able to do that, they lose that control.

 They lose the ability to implement the guardrails, the controls necessary to be able to effectively build the correct solution and implement it most effectively and most user friendly to ensure that it actually aligns with their core principles.

 Apple restructured its AI teams, delayed key Siri updates, and was slower than rivals to hire top LLM talent.

 In 2024, when Apple finally introduced its generative AI platform, Apple Intelligence, users were hopeful, but the rollout stumbled.

 Apple Intelligence started rolling out this fall, and it had several different kinds of features.

 Apple also did another feature that would summarize your notifications, and Apple actually kind of got into hot water for this because the artificial intelligence system was summarizing news stories incorrectly.

 So, for example, the BBC had a big problem with this where they were pushing out news alerts to people's phones like normal, but Apple Intelligence was interpreting it incorrectly and giving the wrong answer: literally fake news pushed to people's screens.

 That was another stumble out the gate here for the Apple Intelligence system.

 It was supposed to kind of smartly tell you what was going on with all your apps, and it didn't really live up to that promise, so they had to walk some of those features back.

 The major challenge has been the hallucinations around the news alerts, which have been pretty significant.

 The other factor is around differentiation, and it's inability to keep up, inability to act to the leading edge.

 So when you when you look at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others who are building in-house and developing AI capabilities, they're able to bring products to market, test, evaluate them, add to them.

 Siri, in its most basic form and functionality, has probably not delivered the virtual assistant experience that your average iPhone user is seeking.

 Apple can still win within the market, but it needs those upgrades to become the virtual assistant that I think we can all dream the dream and thinking about.

 Tim Cook addressed this in Apple's Q2 2025 earnings call.

 With regard to the more personal Siri as you mentioned, we just need more time to complete the work so they meet our high quality bar.

 Apple declined CNBC's request for an interview for this story.

 Apple's AI challenges go beyond Siri: t hey're also about infrastructure, from cloud computing to custom chips to model development.

 Unlike competitors Google and Microsoft, Apple has not built the kind of full stack AI pipelines or hyperscale cloud systems needed to support cutting-edge generative AI.

 Instead, Apple's leaned in to a very different approach: privacy-first, on-device AI and outside partnerships.

 Apple is different, right? They don't have a cloud business.

 With Apple Intelligence, at least Apple's own technology, t he goal is to be able to say something to the effect of, "Hey Siri, find the picture of my wife in a red dress.

" To drive those queries are much smaller: you could run those on your device, so you don't need cloud infrastructure necessarily to run those queries.

 Apple has partnered with outsiders for some AI features: OpenAI in the US and Alibaba in China.

 And Apple Intelligence is only available on newer devices: iPhones with the A17 Pro chip, which include the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 16 lineup, and iPads and Macs with A17 Pro or M1 chips.

 I think Apple, by partnering with OpenAI, then partnering potentially with Google and Alibaba, and doing all of these different partnerships means that it's harder to provide that R&D process, that iterative rollout, which supports that kind of more effective go-to-market and implementation.

 However, you can kind of look at ways in which their partner model that they're going with, with generative AI, could be an asset, could be an opportunity to kind of provide the differentiation.

 The strategy means the models Apple trains are smaller but also more limited.

 If you ask broad questions like "How does quantum theory affect chip design?" Apple hands that off to OpenAI.

 Still, Apple is spending heavily to close the gap.

 In February, it pledged more than $500 billion in US investments over four years, including new chip facilities, AI infrastructure, and hiring.

 The $500 billion investment, this was something that Apple does every four years at the beginning of a new presidential term.

 They like to have a little gift for whoever the new president is or whoever is just sworn in.

 Now, there's a lot of fuzzy math going on here, and they don't exactly say where all that money is going.

 In this case, what they promised the Trump administration is just one factory, and that is going to be one in Houston, Texas that makes artificial intelligence servers for that private cloud that runs Apple Intelligence.

 The company is also reportedly building its own AI chips under Project ACDC, expanding AI teams and testing localized LLM integrations.

 But the fundamental issue remains: Apple still doesn't own the full stack.

 Without the hyperscaler, without that public cloud infrastructure, they don't have the pond ecosystem for R&D and implementation that the others do.

 I think there's always going to be challenges around fighting it out with the Googles of the world i f in an AI race, if they don't have those in-house public cloud capabilities.

 Unlike rivals like Meta, Apple has spent years prioritizing privacy.

 That means it has not collected the same volume of user data needed to train powerful AI models.

 It's a strategy that builds brand trust, but limits flexibility.

 This is what Apple's always done, and they've always had to kind of balance the privacy of its users versus the latest and greatest features.

 And when it comes to AI, we can see the disadvantage, at least, to that mindset, because without using just the open web in the same way and without using customer data in the same way that Google and OpenAI and so many others have been doing — Grok, for example, the xAI product, it uses so much data from the X platform, formerly Twitter, to inform and train its chatbot — Apple doesn't have a social network to lean on the way Facebook might, or that Grok or xAI I might have.

 So instead, they have to rely on public data or synthetic data that's already generated by AI to do it.

 And what we're learning now is, yes, that kind of works, b ut at the same time, it doesn't make the product as powerful.

 Apple just can't be a bystander.

 They can't just look at this and play in their own sandbox.

 Look at every other big tech company.

 And that's what those are: i t's the challenges, but also the opportunity facing Apple, bu t developers are yearning for Apple to be a player.

 At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC, in June, it could be more about refining than reinventing.

 The long awaited, smarter Siri that is context-aware, faster, and more conversational is still in development.

 Key pieces might arrive in iOS 19.

 That means Apple's AI rollout remains a work in progress.

 There's going to be this sort of extra dose of skepticism around everything they announced related to artificial intelligence.

 They kind of have to say something about AI, t hey can't just ignore it.

 But, we know that those things that they were working on last year just couldn't get off the ground.

 So, maybe AI takes a little bit of a backseat compared to some of the other features they want to bring to the iPhone, but I do expect them to still talk about Siri, to still talk about artificial intelligence and Apple Intelligence, t he new features through AI that they do plan to bring to the phones in the future.

 Despite delays, Apple has an edge scale.

 It controls more than 2 billion active devices, runs its own chip division, and still enjoys deep user trust.

 You have 2.

4 billion iOS devices around the world.

 I recognize that Siri can be obtuse.

 She can't do what so many other AI systems can do.

 In fact, she isn't even AI, leaving Apple open for, well, open for what? When it's ready, you'll get it.

 And they won't rush it out the door just to please Wall Street.

 There.

 That's Apple's AI mission: to get it right for you, n ot this street that's right over here.

 Tim Cook will have the best, they all have the best AI.

 Cook's North Star is client satisfaction, and over time, that strategy has proven winner.

 The one thing that would be a massive value-driver for Apple and Siri would be if they managed to implement a genetic AI on-device.

 That would be a huge opportunity for Apple to kind of bring some differentiation and be the first kind of major mainstream vendor to bring a genetic AI on-device.

 But competition is heating up.

 In May, the lead designer of the iPhone, Jony Ive, officially teamed up with OpenAI to create a new AI device that could be a potential threat to Apple.

 News of the partnership caused Apple's stock to fall.

 I think Apple underestimated the AI shift.

 I think they underestimated the complexity, and I think it's really why they had to bring OpenAI in as a partner.

 And I think when you look over the last six months, I mean, there have been mea culpa, which is pretty rare for Apple.

 Apple is also expected to shift how it announces new features, revealing them closer to release.

 It's a move that could help manage expectations, signaling how much the company is recalibrating in real time.

 This is always every year, their big software event where they say, "Here is how we're going to update the software for your iPhone, for your iPad, for your Mac," and so forth.

 Now, last year, that's when they debuted Apple Intelligence.

 And as we know now, hindsight being 2020, a lot of what they said just did not live up to the promise.

 Apple has weathered big transitions well in the past, from Intel to its own chips, from iPods to iPhones.

 But the shift to AI is different.

 You know, Apple didn't become the most valuable company in the world by accident.

 There's a DNA there that I think AI they definitely underestimated, but that's also the opportunity that they can go after.