Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported over the weekend that some Apple employees believe the company is about two years behind in AI.
Tim Cook didn't address this directly during the WSJ interview, but he did say the company's goal is to always be the best, not first, and that includes AI…
Is Apple Really Two Years Behind on AI?
The first thing to note is that there are very few people capable of do something like this assessment. If you work at Apple outside of AI projects, you probably don’t have a better idea of the state of AI development at the company than any outsider.
Even if you work on Apple’s AI team, the company’s famous approach to silos means you likely only know about your specific area. There have been cases of Apple engineers toiling for years without having any idea how their work would ultimately be used — and that includes people working on important elements of the original iPhone without having any idea what it was like for the smartphone project.
The only people who have a good idea of the overall state of Apple's AI development are senior executives who have an overview of all the different areas of the company's work in this area, and they certainly don't talk to anyone.
So the people talking to Gurman don't have the facts necessary to form that kind of judgment.
However, it is certainly fair to say that Siri currently lags behind Google Assistant.
Siri vs. Google Assistant
I've already talked about the misleading comparison between Siri and Alexa. The point is that Alexa is not smarter, but third parties can give the assistant certain additional skills, which is an approach that simply doesn't scale.
However, things become more telling when you compare Siri to Google Assistant. There’s no doubt that the latter is now significantly smarter and more capable, and the difference frankly confuses Apple’s intelligent assistant.
Time after time, asking the same sequence of questions to Siri and Google Assistant reveals a huge gulf in the respective results, and this hasn’t changed much even in the latest developer beta.
One example I often give is two simple, related queries:
Q1: How do I get to the Tower of London from here?
Q2: What are the opening hours?
Siri answers the first question by opening Apple Maps and showing directions, but by default it assumes you’re driving, which would be the stupidest way to make that journey. Driving will be slower than public transport, and parking near the Tower is incredibly expensive.
When asked the next question, Siri literally had no idea what I was talking about:
That's a bakery I've never heard of, let alone visited, and two places that have the word 'open' in their names. It's a ridiculous answer, demonstrating that Siri failed to retain context even with a second question immediately following the first.
Google Assistant is smarter in two ways. First, in response to the first question, it starts with “The best way to get to the Tower from here is…” and correctly shows that it's one stop on the DLR and then a very short walk.
Second, when I ask a follow-up question, Assistant understands the context. It gives me a verbal answer about today's opening hours and displays the hours for the rest of the week on the screen.
Siri has admittedly shown some improvement in its context understanding in iOS 18.1. For example, if I ask the weather in Cape Town and then ask, “What time is it there?” it understands and gives the correct answer. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
But the real comparison here is with generative AI
There are many cases where none of the intelligent assistants achieve the level of context understanding we would expect from a five-year-old.
For example, if I ask, “What time is it in New York?” and then “What is the value of one pound sterling there?” Siri will ask me what currency I want to convert to, and Google Assistant will give me the exchange rate for euros.
If I ask “What's on at the Marylebone Theatre?” both assistants will resort to showing me web results.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, will give me the exchange rate for the US dollar and answer the theatre question without any problem, as well as providing useful information about the play.
But does it even matter?
Probably not, for two reasons.
First, developments in a field like AI are non-linear. AI capabilities like ChatGPT were a distant dream until they suddenly weren't.
The first chatbot to ever attempt to pass the Turing test was ELIZA in the 1960s, and it actually fooled some people. We didn’t see anything dramatically better than that for literally decades after that. Then ChatGPT launched in 2022, followed by a flurry of other LLMs. The world changed dramatically, very quickly.
So even if Apple is two years behind now, that’s completely different from saying it will take the company two years to catch up to today’s cutting-edge AI capabilities. And that doesn’t mean Apple won’t overtake the current market leaders.
Now that the company has finally decided to get into the AI game, it has more resources than any other company on the planet to throw at the problem. It can spend more and hire more than anyone else. Anyone want to bet money on Apple being two years behind by the end of next year?
Secondly, Apple never competes with the market as a whole, in any area. The company doesn't care one bit whether Samsung sells more smartphones or Lenovo sells more PCs. It targets the most profitable segment of the market and dominates there.
So it doesn't matter whether Apple Intelligence becomes bigger than ChatGPT. Three things matter:
- Can Siri match the intelligence of the AI leaders within a year or two?
- Can Apple do this while offering the best privacy protections available?
- Will Apple Intelligence help sell hardware?
I suspect the answer to all three is yes.
Top comment from Carol Danvers
No, it doesn't matter and it never has. Apple is constantly being told that it is behind, late, falling behind. Then there are predictions of doom, failure, financial ruin.
This has been a game since April 1, 1976. Apple's impending demise is a cottage industry that supports countless tech bloggers, hate sites, and the like. These types make a living bashing Apple. If Apple actually failed, they would be out of work and broke.
Just read the posts below. Apple is a loser.
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The second question, I think, will prove crucial. People are just beginning to understand the huge privacy implications of AI models trained on their own input data. Privacy will be considered more and more important to more and more people as time goes on.
This has always been one of Apple's USPs in general, and in the AI arena, the company has once again taken a clear lead here:
- Apple Intelligence's privacy can be independently verified thanks to an “exceptional step”
- Apple Intelligence is probably the most secure way to use ChatGPT; “a data vacuum on steroids”
- Security Bite: Ranking My Favorite New iOS 18 Privacy Features
- Apple's Intelligence Servers Are Really Basic, Says Craig Federighi, and That's On Purpose
- Apple Intelligence Privacy Features: Here's What You Need to Know
No one does more than Apple in an area that will likely be considered as important as intelligent AI technology over time.
Image: Apple and 9to5Mac
