This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on March 8th, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Apple is currently pressing its competitors hard with its focus on privacy. But there’s one area where the tech giant has a real problem: artificial intelligence.

The normally somewhat reserved Apple executive Phil Schiller was in excellent spirits when he stepped onto the stage.

He was about to present the company’s entry into artificial intelligence — the recently acquired voice assistant Siri. It was the autumn of 2011, and the tech press was gathered in a cultural center in downtown San Francisco.

The thoughts of those in the audience weren’t on Schiller, though — they were on someone else. On Steve Jobs. Earlier that year he had gone on indefinite medical leave. The day after the presentation, he died from cancer.

Jobs was the man behind the acquisition of Siri, made the year before. At the time it was an app that claimed to be a virtual personal assistant. Today it’s the foundation of Apple’s investments in artificial intelligence.

But there’s a great deal to suggest that Steve Jobs would not be particularly pleased with Apple’s progress in this area.

During the 2011 presentation, Schiller complained about having to learn a particular way of speaking to these voice assistants to get them to work properly.

Ironically, Siri has barely moved beyond that stage itself, over a decade later.

On the contrary, Siri has been seen — even by some employees who work on the product — as inferior to the likes of Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant.

Then Microsoft entered the picture.

ChatGPT has exploded in popularity and been integrated into Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Asking the same questions of ChatGPT and Siri yields near-parodically poor answers from Apple. This obvious weakness was something Jobs would have neither accepted nor tolerated.

But the AI market is still in its early stages, and major changes at Apple could be closer than people think.

The clearest sign of this is found in Apple’s hardware — specifically the new M-series chips they’ve been using since the autumn of 2020.

These are custom-built chips used only in Apple products, which means their design and function tells us something about the company’s strategy for the future.

The M-series chips contain what’s called a “neural engine,” used specifically for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The M1 chip handles these types of tasks fifteen times faster than the Intel chips Apple previously used. The second generation, M2, is also 40 percent faster than its predecessor.

Apple’s custom hardware signals that a better and more powerful artificial intelligence is an internal top priority.

The tight integration between Apple’s hardware and software demonstrates this in a way that competitors can’t match. Google Assistant or ChatGPT run their computations in the cloud and work regardless of what hardware you use to access them.

Apple works differently — to a much greater extent keeping data on each individual user’s device for privacy reasons. A decision that has led to weaker results until now. But with new custom hardware, Apple may be able to correct this imbalance.

Apple is also investing heavily in building out its internal AIML team (“artificial intelligence machine learning”). At the time of writing, there are over 170 open positions to apply for in this area alone.

170 positions isn’t an enormous number given how many employees the tech giants employ in total, but it’s happening at a time when large layoffs are being reported almost daily. Apple is clearly moving in the opposite direction and hasn’t had layoffs in other units either — at least not yet.

“For decades we’ve been enticed by the dream of being able to talk to technology and get it to do things for us. But it never comes true. […] It’s such a disappointment,” Schiller said in 2011.

It has been a disappointment until now, in fact — for Apple and Siri in particular.

But everything points to Apple’s ambitions in this area being substantial, with internal resources to make world-class investments. There are therefore plenty of reasons not to write off Siri just yet.