this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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14
John Giannandrea out as Siri chief, Apple Vision Pro lead in (appleinsider.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don’t know if this counts as a conspiracy theory but I kind of suspect the story of the Vision Pro was that it was originally a real project focused as much on patents as anything. If they wanted a viable consumer product line, they’d have sold the 1st generation(s) at a loss to help an app ecosystem flourish and compete with other XR products (even if an Apple’s XR headset would still cost $500 more because Apple).

The US military was calling for XR headsets and even evaluated HoloLens. Companies were obviously exploring too. That’s when Vision Pro was under development. Apple isn’t really a military contractor — I’m not sure if they do any — but having patents to license to future XR headsets could potentially be very valuable and subsidize Vision Pro consumer pricing until the component prices fell.

Then, HoloLens shit the bed. It made soldiers nauseous and the military (and companies) pretty much lost interest in XR. The entire HoloLens team got laid off. By then, the Vision Pro was probably in early production but the potential revenue from having the most advanced XR’s patents became essentially nil. So, they just sold them at the actual cost and gave up on the product line.

In that scenario, the Vision Pro lead (and team) delivered exactly what Tim Apple wanted but the revenue potential disappeared. Meanwhile, “A.I. Siri” continued to suck (except the new animation; props to that team). So, the Vision Pro management was rewarded even if the Vision Pro failed in the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Or it’s just the classic Apple “launch some weird shit with a cool interaction model or form factor, but we don’t really know how people will -actually- use this.”

AppleTV, AppleWatch, Firewire iPod, HomePod, etc. They kick it out, people complain about it, Apple learns the users who adopted it, then they focus the feature set when they better understand the market fit.

IMHO, it seems like that’s the play here. Heck, they even started with the “pro” during the initial launch, which gives them a very obvious off ramp for a cheaper / more focused non-pro product.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

That’s probably the Occam's razor explanation. I obviously have no proof for my little pet theory.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Mike Rockwell, the Apple Vision Pro chief, has replaced John Giannandrea as the executive in charge of Siri, in an executive shakeup to try and rescue Apple's flailing AI efforts.

The glacial rollout of Apple Intelligence and the lack of progress on Siri has not been a good look for Apple over the last year. Now, Apple is making a big change to get things back on track.

The glacial rollout is because it doesn't work, and it can't work. Stop trying so hard to jump in the shit puddle, apple.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

this is silly, integrating Siri with ChatGPT is one of the ways AI will probably benefit apple users. If only just for parsing and contextually processing user requests better than it does now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sure, so long as it doesn’t mess up. Which is not possible. AI has no idea what a calendar is or what the word calendar means. And even if they do limit it to basic functionality like speech to text or scheduling, it already does most of that amd they’d be plowing millions into the slightest improvements.

On the other hand if they try to expand it and have it, say, plan a trip for you - it’s either not going to work or it’s going to have enough spectacular faults that it’s effectively unusable.

They're falling for the hype even though they know it’s just hype.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

AI has no idea what a calendar is or what the word calendar means.

Of course it does, where are you getting this from? This is what LLMs do, understand language. If you ask chaptGPT to add an event to your apple calendar it will say it doesn't have access and give you instructions to do so. Apple is basically working on converting those instructions to interface with siri.

And even if they do limit it to basic functionality like speech to text or scheduling, it already does most of that amd they’d be plowing millions into the slightest improvements.

that's not what the ChatGPT part will be doing. As you say, siri already handles that. ChatGPT is there to understand the language and context of the request, something LLMs do much much better than Siri now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What LLMs do has nothing to do with understanding. There's no there there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

i suspect we are going to have a semantic disagreement on what "understanding" means here.

ChatGPT is absolutely trained on the concept of calendars, that iPhones indeed have calendars, and how they work. It doesn't need to "understand" what a calendar is on a deep epistemological level to process requests about them. If you ask chatGPT a question about calendars, it'll answer you. So in that shallower sense LLMs absolutely "understand" what you mean, and that's enough for chatGPT to help siri.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No, they really don't. They answer you with words that are commonly found in conjunction with calendars. There is code in Siri that understands calendars, but the LLM part ain't it. I have, ahem, firsthand knowledge of how Siri does this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There is code in Siri that understands calendars, but the LLM part ain’t it.

yes i know, you are getting hung up on my colloquial use of "understand". the LLM doesn't need to "understand" it on that level because siri does. the LLM is there to parse the language and hand off to Siri. that's all i'm saying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Fair. I think it's important from an "Is this True AGI?" sense to distinguish these, but yes, in the colloquial sense I guess the system could be said to understand, even if it's not strictly the actual LLM part that does it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

ChatGPT is there to understand the language and context of the request

Like, how? Or why? I admit I don’t use Siri hardly at all but the most I wanted from it was making a note, calling someone, or getting a simple search back. ChatGPT only does the latter that I know of, and its answers are often poorly sourced and often very wrong.

I don’t know - based on that - why I’d let it near anything actually important.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

with chatgpt siri will just be way better at understanding everyday language. For example, if i am listening to an Apple Music playlist with a bunch of different artists and i say "hey siri play this album" it has no idea what I mean. ChatGPT easily handles context dependent language like that.

If you haven't used chatGPT you should try it and compare the results with siri. It's not perfect but it is way easier to get what you want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Why can’t it work?

I work on AI systems that integrate into other apps and make contextual requests. That’s the big feature that Apple hasn’t launched, and it’s very much a problem that others have solved before.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I’d have to know more specifics to really answer but the gist is that it will cost an exorbitant amount fir very little gain. There’s no magic to be had and every single honest survey shows people overwhelmingly don’t want it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, it a lot of those studies are about stupid stuff like an LLM in-app to look at grammar, or a diffusion model to throw stupid clip art into things. No one gives a shit about that stuff. You can easily just cut and paste from OpenAI’s experience, and get access to more tools there.

That said, being able to ask an OS to look at one local vectorized DB of texts, images, documents, recognize context, then compose and complete tasks based upon that context. That shit is fucking cool.

That said, a lot of people haven’t experienced that yet, so when they get asked about “AI,” their responses are framed with what they’ve experienced.

It’s the “faster horse” analogy. People that don’t know about cars, busses, and trains will ask for a faster horse when you ask them to envision a faster mode of transport.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Okay, and fair enough, but I don't want anything going to anyone. If it's apple, it's at least part of that DPA and it's part of the whole deal, but OpenAI can gtfo of my phone. That's a hard no.

Even then - what, find all the pictures of my dog bucky and message them to grandma? I guess? Put pushpin icons on the map where all my phot -oh wait it already does that. Umm . . how many of my phone contacts are Masons? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I dunno - I just don't know what I'd use it for.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

I think enterprise needs will ensure that people develops solutions to this.

Companies can’t have their data creeping out into the public, or even creeping out into other parts of the org. If you’re customer, roadmap, or HR data got into the wrong hands, that could be a disaster.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft will never get AI into the workplace is AI is sharing confidential enterprise data outside of an organization. And all of these tech companies desperately want their tools to be used in enterprises.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

"it" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I agree a lot of the "AI" features being pushed are junk that I don't want (e.g. image playground), but there are some that i do think that will help a lot as we have discussed in the other chain.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The problem is that Apple's extensive marketing of Apple Intelligence has led to expectations that far surpass what the final product is likely to be.

Most people think generative AI is magic coming out of a hat, so even if Apple delivers at the same level as other companies, people will feel like they've been misled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Apple’s big problem is that Apple intelligence’s two most interesting features, contextual awareness + Siri finally having deep integration, never got reliable enough to get into public or developer beta this year.

That was the thing everyone wanted, but they basically only got LLM summaries / drafting, and image generators. They got the stuff that is easy to make.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The problem is that Apple’s extensive marketing of Apple Intelligence has led to expectations that far surpass what the final product is likely to be.

like what specifically? I think most people will be very happy if the only practical improvement is Siri working a lot better, which should be achievable.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (3 children)

"Surely the lead on a failed pie-in-the-sky project will be able to turn around this entirely separate and currently failing pie-in-the-sky project!"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

At least one of those guys is able to ship a product that does what it was advertised to do.

The problem with the Vision Pro is that no one wants to pay $4000 for what it does.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

At least there’s a market for Siri.

I don’t think anyone believes the Vision Pro sucks as much as Siri.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The Vision Pro is a cool solution in search of a user need.

Voice control is a user need that Apple struggles to deliver solutions for.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

Right. So take the guy who made the cool solution and put him where the user need is. Seems like a good move to me. Any change for Siri seems like a good move.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

the execution and delivery of Vision Pro was not the problem, that's where Siri is struggling now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Does that mean Vision Pro is officially dead?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Starting to sound like a new season of Silicon Valley.