A slightly less cynical take is that they want to temper expectations for the capabilities of LLMs in people’s day-to-day lives, specifically in the context of Apple products. A “smarter Siri” is never going to be an autonomous personal assistant à la Jarvis from Iron Man, which seems to be where a lot of investors think things are going. That tracks with this [0] preprint also released by Apple a few months ago.

A slightly more cynical take is that you’re absolutely correct, and making excuses for weak machine learning prowess has long been an Apple tenet. Recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google’s equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming “we keep your data private so we can’t train on it the way Google can.”

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

Everyone has an agenda. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are incentivized to overstate the capabilities of LLMs, so it’s not like they’re any less biased.

I get the sense that many of the AI features shoved into consumer products recently have been marketed more towards investors than users. The companies are basically advertising that they're "keeping up" with the competition, meanwhile the features themselves receive mixed-to-poor reviews and are never capable of all the things advertised. So it seems to me that all of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Samsung are currently "failing" at AI in exactly the same ways. If Apple is trying to start going a different direction that seems like a good sign.