Simon Willison’s Weblog

14th March 2025 - Link Blog

Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes (via) Mark Gurman reports on some leaked details from internal Apple meetings concerning the delays in shipping personalized Siri. This note in particular stood out to me:

Walker said the decision to delay the features was made because of quality issues and that the company has found the technology only works properly up to two-thirds to 80% of the time. He said the group “can make more progress to get those percentages up, so that users get something they can really count on.” [...]

But Apple wants to maintain a high bar and only deliver the features when they’re polished, he said. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse.”

I imagine it's a lot harder to get reliable results out of small, local LLMs that run on an iPhone. Features that fail 1/3 to 1/5 of the time are unacceptable for a consumer product like this.