Apple’s internal AI chatbot project sounds promising—but will it see the light of day?
Especially after facing major roadblocks trying to merge Siri’s legacy code with its AI ambitions.
After its ill-fated Apple Car project, now shelved indefinitely, landing a competitive AI product marks another one of Apple's biggest struggles.
The company has consistently let down users and investors when it comes to AI. While its tech rivals are busy building island-sized data centers stacked with Nvidia chips to power the next era of artificial intelligence, Apple has mostly been watching from the sidelines.
Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, Apple’s internal AI efforts have been slow, quiet, and, so far, underwhelming. The company officially kicked off its AI efforts in mid-2024, rolling out email and text summaries, emoji-style image generation, and a visual redesign of Siri. The branding? Apple Intelligence.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
But it quickly became obvious that Apple Intelligence, the brand under which these features were released, wasn’t ready for prime time.
It launched with the iPhone 16 in 2024 with promises of a smarter AI experience, but what showed up was barely baked. The implementation of these AI tools (especially Siri) worked in theory, but they felt under-developed and limited in practice. The rollout has since dragged out. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the team ran into major roadblocks trying to merge Siri’s legacy code with its AI ambitions.
Now, with iPhone 17 right around the corner, there’s still zero confidence that Apple Intelligence will be fully ready by September 2025, especially if the iOS 26 beta updates are anything to go by. Not even its internal AI development team has been able to produce anything that can match the most popular Gen AI tools available right now.
