Report: Apple Killed Self-Driving Cars to Give Siri an AI Makeover

According to a report in The New York Times citing multiple sources, Apple quietly underwent its biggest corporate reorganization in over a decade to focus on generative AI. It was such a major shift that it played a role in CEO Tim Cook’s decision to cancel Apple’s $10 billion bet on self-driving vehicles so it could focus instead on what it now sees as an existential threat.

Apple executives worry that AI could undermine the company’s dominance of the smartphone market by replacing iOS as the operating system and replacing the App Store ecosystem with a new generation of AI apps called agents that can more efficiently perform tasks—like booking a ride on Uber—than can iOS apps. In such a future, the iPhone would just be a “dumb brick,” and could be easily replaced.

What’s not clear is why it took Apple so long to figure this out.

According to the publication, executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea tested OpenAI’s ChatGPT over several weeks in early 2023, and their takeaway will be obvious to anyone who has used these technologies: OpenAI had “leapfrogged” Siri, Apple’s often maligned digital assistant, and by a wide margin.

To catch up, Apple leadership declared that generative AI is a so-called tent pole project, the internal term that the firm uses to rally employees around “once in a decade” initiatives. And it killed its self-driving vehicle project, reassigning hundreds of engineers to AI, sending a clear message. Since then, it’s been working to build out a generative AI product pipeline.

The first deliverables will be on display during June’s WWDC keynote, when Apple unveils a revamped Siri that works like a chatbot by engaging in ongoing conversations instead of just handling individual tasks in isolation. That’s quite a leap for an iPhone feature that never fulfilled its original promise or improved in any meaningful ways after its initial release in 2011.

The updated Siri will be much improved, but it won’t take on ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots directly. Instead, it will do a better job of performing familiar, targeted tasks—setting timers, creating reminders, and the like—while adding new capabilities like summarizing text messages. And it will remember context so it can handle follow-up questions.

The key to this new functionality, as expected, is that it will happen on-device, using the upgraded AI hardware—Apple’s “Neural Engine,” an NPU component of its Apple Silicon chipsets—and additional RAM that will arrive in the next iPhones.

The new Siri won’t be the only AI functionality Apple brings to the iPhone, but The New York Times didn’t have anything to add about the company’s other plans. Apple is known to have spoken with Anthropic, Cohere, Google, and OpenAI about partnering on other AI functionality, some of which will happen in the cloud, instead of on-device on the iPhone. These capabilities will be complementary to the on-device AI features.