Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett published a well-timed full-length feature for Bloomberg about Apple’s artificial intelligence features. Instead of celebrating my birthday like a normal person, I carved out some time to read the report. Here we go:

As for the Siri upgrade, Apple was targeting April 2025, according to people working on the technology. But when Federighi started running a beta of the iOS version, 18.4, on his own phone weeks before the operating system’s planned release, he was shocked to find that many of the features Apple had been touting—including pulling up a driver’s license number with a voice search—didn’t actually work, according to multiple executives with knowledge of the matter. (The WWDC demos were videos of an early prototype, portraying what the company thought the system would be able to consistently achieve.)

I disagree with the “early prototype” phrasing of this quote. The features didn’t actually work on real devices but were portrayed as being fully finished in the 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, including design details and text on the screen. The demonstration made the more personalized iOS 18 Siri seem like it was all working, when in reality, “many” of the features just didn’t exist. That’s the opposite of a prototype, where the design and finishing touches aren’t there, but the general product still works. A prototype car still in development is still drivable; a model car looks finished but can’t move an inch on its own. The WWDC keynote demonstration wasn’t a prototype — it was a model. Some readers might quibble with this nitpick of mine, but I firmly believe it’s inaccurate to call anything a prototype if it doesn’t do what it was shown as doing.

“This is a crisis,” says a senior member of Apple’s AI team. A different team member compares the effort to a foundering ship: “It’s been sinking for a long time.” According to internal data described to Bloomberg Businessweek, the company’s technology remains years behind the competition’s.

It doesn’t take “internal data” to know Siri is worse than ChatGPT.

What’s notable about artificial intelligence is that Apple has devoted considerable resources to the technology and has little to show for it. The company has long had far fewer AI-focused employees than its competitors, according to executives at Apple and elsewhere. It’s also acquired fewer of the pricey graphics processing units (GPUs) necessary to train and run LLMs than competitors have.

I’m willing to bet this is the handiwork of Luca Maestri, Apple’s previous chief financial officer, whom Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, appears to lend more credence to than his hardcore product people. Maestri reportedly blocked the machine learning team at Apple from getting high-end GPUs because he, the money man, thought it wasn’t a good use of the company’s nearly endless cash flow. What a complete joke. If this is the reason Maestri is no longer Apple’s CFO, good riddance.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for services and a close confidant of Cook’s, has told colleagues that the company’s position atop the tech world is at risk. He’s pointed out that Apple isn’t like Exxon Mobil Corp., supplying a commodity the world will continue to need, and he’s expressed worries that AI could do to Apple what the iPhone did to Nokia.

Cue is one of the smarter people at Apple, and I don’t disagree with this assertion. Cue, Phil Schiller, the company’s decades-long marketing chief, and many other executives within the company have reportedly voiced grave concerns over Apple’s market dominance, and Cook decides to listen to the retired finance executive. It’s difficult to express — at least without using expletives — the level of outrage I feel about his leadership.

Around 2014 “we quickly became convinced this was something revolutionary and much more powerful than we first understood,” one of them says. But the executive says they couldn’t convince Federighi, their boss, that AI should be taken seriously: “A lot of it fell on deaf ears.”

Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, deserves to be at least severely reprimanded for demonstrating features that never existed and only deciding to act after he was handed a product that didn’t work. Does he think he’s some kind of god? What do these people do at Apple? Get on the engineers’ level, look over their shoulders, and make sure the product you showed on video months earlier is getting along. I’m not asking Federighi to write Swift code with his own bare hands, hunched over his MacBook Pro on the steps of Apple Park during his lunch break. I think he should be the manager of the software division and make sure the features he promised the public were coming are actually being made. “Here, sir, we think you’ll like this” is such a terrible way to run a company. Even Steve Jobs didn’t do that.

Cook, who was generally known for keeping his distance from product development, was pushing hard for a more serious AI effort. “Tim was one of Apple’s biggest believers in AI,” says a person who worked with him. “He was constantly frustrated that Siri lagged behind Alexa,” and that the company didn’t yet have a foothold in the home like Amazon’s Echo smart speaker.

What does “pushing hard” mean? He literally runs the company. If he’s “pushing hard” and nobody is listening to him, he should consider himself no longer wanted at Apple and hand in a resignation letter to the board. If Jobs were just “pushing hard” with no results, he’d start firing people.

Other leaders shared Federighi’s reservations. “In the world of AI, you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment,” another longtime executive says. “That’s not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the endgame is.”

The endgame is Apple having worse AI than Mistral, a company practically nobody on planet Earth has ever heard of.

Colleagues say Giannandrea has told them that consumers don’t want tools like ChatGPT and that one of the most common requests from customers is to disable it.

This guy ought to have his head examined. ChatGPT just overtook Wikipedia in monthly visitors. But sure, tell me about how consumers don’t want ChatGPT. Of course most customers want to disable it: because Apple’s integration of ChatGPT within iOS is utterly useless. It doesn’t even get questions right. Why would anyone want to use a product that doesn’t work correctly? The official ChatGPT app is right there on iOS and works all the time, while Siri takes an eternity to get the answer from ChatGPT, just for it to be wrong. Laughable. Has Giannandrea ever used his own software?

With the project flagging, morale on the engineering team has been low. “We’re not even being told what’s happening or why,” one member says. “There’s no leadership.”

It’s time to start firing people. I don’t say that lightly because these are people’s livelihoods, and nobody should lose their job for missing something or making a mistake. I never said Cook should be fired after the bad 2013 Mac Pro GPUs, the 2016 MacBook Pro’s thermal throttling, or the atrocious butterfly keyboard mechanism. But I do think he and many others at Apple should be sacked for failing to do their jobs. When engineers are telling the press there’s no leadership at their company, leadership needs to be replaced. Engineers hate leadership. They hate project managers. Who likes C-suite executives peering over their shoulder while doing nothing to contribute? But at some core level, someone needs to manage the engineers. There must be someone at the top making the decisions for everyone. Apparently, that someone isn’t doing their job at Apple.

Unlike at other Silicon Valley giants, employees at Apple headquarters have to pay for meals at the cafeteria. But as Giannandrea’s engineers raced to get Apple Intelligence out, some were often given vouchers to eat for free, breeding resentment among other teams. “I know it sounds stupid, but Apple does not do free food,” one employee says. “They shipped a year after everyone else and still got free lunch.”

They’re arguing about free lunch while their figurative lunch is being eaten by companies nobody’s ever heard of. Do they employ children at this company?

Its commitment to privacy also extends to the personal data of noncustomers: Applebot, the web crawler that scrapes data for Siri, Spotlight and other Apple search features, allows websites to easily opt out of letting their data be used to improve Apple Intelligence. Many have done just that… An executive who takes a similar view says, “Look at Grok from X—they’re going to keep getting better because they have all the X data. What’s Apple going to train on?”

Every single scraper on the entire World Wide Web can be told not to look at a site by adding the bot to its robots.txt file. This is not rocket science. ChatGPT, Claude, Alexa, and Gemini all have their own web scrapers, and site administrators have been blocking them for years. That’s not a “privacy stance” on Apple’s part. This sounds like it was written by a fifth grader adding superfluous characters to their essay to meet their teacher’s word count requirement. Nevertheless, these sources asking, “What’s Apple to train on?” are some of the stupidest people ever interviewed by the press at a technology company.

To meet expected European Union regulations, the company is now working on changing its operating systems so that, for the first time, users can switch from Siri as their default voice assistant to third-party options, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

I’ve never been more jealous of E.U. users, and I think Apple should expand this to all regions. The rest of the report is mainly a rehash of rumors and leaks over the past few months — it’s still worth reading, though — but this is really a big deal. If Apple employees are really this discouraged about Siri’s prospects, they should push leadership to allow users to choose other voice assistants instead. As much as I begrudge bringing its name up, Perplexity’s voice assistant manages to act as a third-party voice assistant with acceptable success: It can access Reminders, calendar events, Apple Music, and a plethora of other first- and third-party apps, just like Siri, but imagine if it had all of Siri’s App Intents and shortcuts. Siri lives above every other iOS app, and I think other voice assistants should be given the same functionality.

Apple is talked about as a potential AI company — when it’s shown it’s far from one — thanks to the iPhone, its most popular hardware and software device. The iPhone serves as the most popular marketplace for AI apps in the United States, and every major AI vendor has a pretty good iOS app to attract customers. Why not capitalize on being the vendor? Apple petulantly demands 30 percent of these developers’ subscription revenue because it prides itself on creating an attractive market for developers and end users, yet it doesn’t lean into the App Store’s power. If Apple can’t do something, third-party apps pick up the slack. Apple has no reason to make a hyper-customizable raw photography app because most people using the Camera app on iOS don’t know what raw photography is. Halide and Kino users do, though. Apple Weather doesn’t include radar maps from local weather stations; Carrot Weather does. Siri may not ever be a large language model-powered virtual assistant, but ChatGPT is one, and it works great. Why not capitalize on that?

Apple needs an AI strategy, and until leadership gets a grip on reality, it should embrace third-party developers with open arms.