Apple is two years behind its competitors. So he’s sending 200 engineers to an “AI camp.”

When we talk about AI Big Tech, there is one name missing: Apple. There are many “the wolf is coming” in this matter of artificial intelligencewith companies that are creating ‘hype’ with models that they consider very dangerous and, above all, with artificial general intelligence. However, the “the wolf is coming” par excellence in AI is the new Siri and Apple Intelligence. Apple is tired of being the last and has made the most radical decision two months before WWDC.

Sending almost all Siri engineers to early summer camp.

Issues. Apple has two approaches with AI. On the one hand, a more transparent one for the user that interconnects applications of your systems or that allows us to have advanced information about photos from our gallery. On the other hand, the avalanche of promises they made two years ago about Apple Intelligence. For a start, they were already late to the advertise your system a year and a half after the arrival of ChatGPT. To continue, there were functions that did not reach the devices, others that were delayed and even had to delete promotional videos that showed something totally false.

This translated into an Apple that allied itself with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and, in January of this year, they teamed up with Google to put a huge band-aid: Apple’s next basic models will basically be Gemini. The user will not notice it – it would be a blow to the pride of those from Cupertino – but Google accounts will.

The camp. If two years ago they were late, now they are running out of reaction time. This year we are seeing AI advancing day after day with both American and European and, above all, Chinese models. Apple must get in tune and, as they point out in The Informationhave made the decision to send 200 of Siri and Apple Intelligence engineers to a several-week “camp” focused on programming tools for AI.

It is something that reflects the uncomfortable reality that Apple is experiencing right now. On devices they are doing well (even with a MacBook), are establishing themselves as one of the technological pillars of the United States and They have returned to work in Chinabut in the most important race in recent years, they are still behind. Therefore, it is urgent that the Siri team, which is earning such a bad reputation, gets its act together ahead of what could be one of Apple’s most momentous launches in years.

And it’s not just sending developers to camp: it’s reformulating the company. The departure of John Giannandrea – one of the leaders of Apple’s AI strategy team – left a gap that has been filled by Craig Federighi, the company’s director of software engineering. Mike Rockwell, team leader of the VisionPronow leads the new Siri team. They are two Apple heavyweights who are very much on top of the AI ​​team, which makes clear the importance that Apple is giving to this issue.

60 stay at home. Obviously, the Apple Intelligence ‘laboratories’ are not going to be deserted these weeks. As The Information points out, about 60 members of the Siri development team will remain in their positions to continue shaping the new assistant and another 60 will be in charge of evaluating performance, ensuring that it meets the standards that Apple wants to implement.

Because we are no longer talking only about the quality or functionality of the assistant and Apple Intelligence, but about the ambitious privacy goal. At the presentation of the softwareApple commented that it had built a cloud infrastructure specifically for AI with end-to-end encrypted data sending and that, when that was not possible, the data would be encrypted to obscure the user’s identity. According to the company, none of them would be visible even to its own workers.

The new Siri, now it is. It is evident that Apple seeks to close the gap between its assistant and what the competition has – Google integrated Gemini into Assistant months ago – but they must also close that space between their reality and the ambition they showed when presenting Apple Intelligence. Either way, this year is expected to be the year of the new Siri. According to rumors, we will see during the first half of this yearbut we have been there for four and a half months and there is no trace.

Now, everything indicates that Siri will be the star of Apple’s keynote at WWDC, the great software – and hardware, sometimes – event that will be held from June 8 to 12. Meanwhile, the world of AI continues to spin, and the most curious thing about all of this is what we mentioned at the beginning: Apple has no say. We’ll see if that new Siri manages to get them into the conversation.

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