Apple has encountered significant technical challenges in upgrading Siri with large language models (LLM), leading to a delay in the launch of its core AI function "Apple Intelligence." This has severely dampened investor expectations for this week's WWDC. Bank of America states that Apple may lag behind competitors like Google by more than three years in delivering a "truly modern AI assistant," and the AI dilemma is a key factor contributing to its stock price being the lowest among the "big seven" in the U.S. market this year (down about 18%).
This year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is set to open on June 9th, Eastern Time (Tuesday, Beijing time).
However, according to the latest reports, $Apple (AAPL.US)$encountered technical difficulties in upgrading Siri to integrate advanced large language models (LLM), resulting in the core AI functionality 'Apple Intelligence' being delayed in implementation.
Siri, which Apple takes pride in, has now become the focus of Wall Street's doubts about Apple's innovation capabilities. The upcoming WWDC this week may once again be a source of disappointment for investors, pushing this trillion-dollar giant further behind in the AI arms race.
Siri's upgrade is stalled, and 'Apple Intelligence' is struggling to be developed.
According to recent reports from former employees to the Financial Times in the United Kingdom, Apple is attempting to enhance Siri's conversational abilities through self-developed LLM. These technologies are intended to allow Siri to respond to voice commands with more complex and human-like answers, making it a 'truly conversational assistant.'
However, former Apple employees disclosed that many bugs occurred during the technical integration process, which competitors like OpenAI and Google, building generative AI voice assistants from scratch, have not faced.
A former Apple executive has bluntly stated that incremental development (internally called "mountain climbing") cannot fundamentally rebuild the product.
It is impossible to transform Siri through the so-called "mountain climbing" approach. Clearly, they have stumbled.
Wall Street has lost patience, and stock performance has lagged behind.
"Apple Intelligence" features have repeatedly missed deadlines, leading to a sluggish market expectation for the upcoming 2025 WWDC conference next week.
JPMorgan Analyst Samik Chatterjee stated, "We are in a situation where investors already know what potential good news might be, but the key is: first fulfill what you promised last year."
The difficulties in AI development have severely dragged down the stock price of this technology giant. From 2025 to now, Apple's stock price has dropped by about 18%, making it not only the worst performer among the so-called Magnificent 7 but even lower than the essentially flat Technology Index, Nasdaq.
In addition, the tariff policies of the Trump administration and legal pressures on its highly profitable service business have heightened investor concerns about its long-term growth.
Is Siri's upgrade lagging behind and taking another three years for delivery?
Apple's struggles in the AI field center around Siri. When ChatGPT emerged at the end of 2022, a former senior employee at Apple who had participated in the development of related technologies pointed out: "The company's approach to conversational interaction is changing rapidly, and it is clear that Siri has fallen behind."
Competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are not only running larger and more powerful models, but their voice assistants are also widely regarded as more intelligent than Siri. Although Apple has launched some AI features (such as writing assistance and image generation), the most anticipated transformation of Siri has yet to be released.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently admitted that Siri's technology has not met the company's "high-quality standards," and that development is taking "longer than we imagined." These delays have led Apple to pull a TV advertisement promoting the new Siri update featuring Bella Ramsey, the star of The Last of Us, and the company is facing a false advertising lawsuit from consumers.
A former Apple executive stated that the fragmented leadership team has led to a lack of cohesion in the AI strategy, and the initial reluctance of executives to allocate sufficient budget for technological development has made the situation worse.
An analyst from Bank of America wrote this Monday that the current delays with Siri mean that Apple essentially needs three years or more to launch a "truly modern AI assistant, falling far behind Google and other companies in integrating such technology."
Brand strategy replacing technological breakthroughs?
This year's WWDC seems to focus more on brand revitalization rather than technological breakthroughs.
An earlier article from Wall Street Journal mentioned that Apple is planning to conduct a large-scale renaming of its operating system, adopting a year-based system. The company will also quietly repackage several existing features in apps like Safari and Photos as "AI-driven."
The most important AI announcement at WWDC may be Apple's opening of its foundational models to third-party developers.
This move will enable app developers to utilize the company’s current device-side technology that is used for lightweight tasks such as text summarization. However, its large language model has about 3 billion parameters (a measure of its complexity and learning capacity), which is far fewer than those used by OpenAI and even Apple’s own cloud models for its internal AI functions.
Insiders at Apple are mentally prepared for a "disappointing" AI showcase at this conference, while outside observers are concerned that this release may further highlight Apple's shortcomings in the AI field.
Editor/melody
