IT News on November 8th: Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman revealed in today's (8th) evening update to the Power On newsletter that Apple's new CEO John Ternuston is urging Craig Federighi, the head of software engineering, to accelerate the development of AI and adopt bolder strategies with the goal of upgrading Siri to become AI intelligent agents that can independently complete tasks for users.
During last week's financial report conference call, Ternus was quite optimistic about Apple's AI business. When talking about the new version of Siri, Ternus was even more confident: Apple has finally realized its vision over the years, and the company's AI business has entered a new chapter. "We are very satisfied with the feedback we have received and are also very happy to see that more and more users are able to experience it."
But within Apple, Tenuis's attitude was quite different. He was well aware that Apple was still far behind its competitors. In recent weeks, Tenuis held a closed-door meeting with Federighi, who took over from the previous AI last year and is in charge of Apple's AI business.
Tenuis hopes that Apple can achieve more in the AI field, and is also dissatisfied with Federighi's failure to embrace AI as actively as its competitors. Therefore, he demands that Federighi accelerate the development process and not be content with merely completing the necessary functional upgrades of Siri.
Federighi is still considered a AI skeptic to this day, with concerns about the impact he may have on privacy, security, society, and employment. However, both Federighi and Apple must face an industry environment that has already changed.
Faced with the AI trend led by companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Anthropic, Apple no longer has the strength to remain aloof as it did in the past.
The long-standing management issues within Apple's software department have also come to attention as a result. Federighi is accustomed to personally participating in meetings and making major decisions, and some employees believe that this management style makes it difficult for different opinions to gain support. He also frequently engages in intense debates with those who hold opposing views, using his familiarity with technical details and outstanding debating skills to refute proposals he does not agree with.
IT has learned from reports that this approach sometimes causes dissatisfaction among members of the software engineering and design teams. Some people feel that it is difficult for them to influence the ultimate direction of the product's development.
Federighi's preference for short-term planning is also a problem. He usually only makes plans for the next 12 to 18 months, while Apple's hardware department is accustomed to planning products several years in advance. These two approaches to work can sometimes be difficult to coordinate, which not only slows down product development but may also result in the initial products having less bold features and designs.
Apple hopes to integrate hardware more closely with the development of AI software, so how to coordinate the planning methods of the two departments will become an important task for Tenuus. Although Apple still leads the industry in hardware design and engineering, software development does not always keep up with the pace of hardware.
Nevertheless, Federighi also has the capability to solve problems that other executives find difficult to handle. Last year, after Apple discovered that the former AI team leader, John Giannandrea, was unable to fulfill the company's commitments regarding Siri, Federighi took over the development work and launched a new version of the assistant that could function properly in a relatively short period of time.
