I mean, they tried. They just tried and failed. It may work out for them, though — two years ago it looked like lift-off was likely, or at least possible, so having a frontier model was existential. Today it looks like you might be able to save many billions by being a fast follower. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lift-off narrative comes back around though; we still have maybe a decade until we really understand the best business model for LLMs and their siblings.

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tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you are right. Their generative AI was clearly underwhelming. They have been losing many staff from their AI team.

I’m not sure it matters though. They just had a stonking quarter. iPhone sales are surging ahead. Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.

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9dev 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.

I would rather say their products didn’t just loose in value for not getting an improvement there. Everyone agrees that Siri sucks, but I’m pretty sure they tried to replace it with a natural language version built from the ground up, and realised it just didn’t work out yet: yes, they have a bad, but at least kinda-working voice assistant with lots of integrations into other apps. But replacing that with something that promises to do stuff and then does nothing, takes long to respond, and has less integrations due to the lack of keywords would have been a bad idea if the technology wasn’t there yet.

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irishcoffee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, what it seems like is financial discipline.

	▲	tonyedgecombe 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We do know that they made a number of promises on AI[1] and then had to roll them back because the results were so poor[2]. They then went on to fire the person responsible for this division[3]. That doesn't sound like a financial decision to me. [1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2024/06/wwdc24-highlights/ [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-18/how-apple... [3] https://nypost.com/2025/12/02/business/apple-shakes-up-ai-te...