Apple publicly refutes Mark Gurman a third time

[RockRock8]

Apple says the new personalized Siri upgrade is on track in its development and release. Apple never claimed it was coming in iOS 26.4, nor that there would be split releases of it over time, nor did they say they would use multiple different models for Siri.

Apple is pissed off, in my opinion, and they're calling out bullshit. I'm really happy about that, and I support that completely!

1) Mark Gurman falsely claimed Johny Srouji would quit.

Johny Srouji said that's blatantly false and untrue, and that he loves Apple and isn't going to quit working

2) Mark Gurman falsely claimed new Siri would run on Google's "TPU" servers.

Tim Cook said on an earnings call that the new Siri would run on Apple's custom hardware, PCC servers.

3) Mark Gurman now falsely claims only DAYS after literally saying it would come in iOS 26.4 that Siri is "delayed" after hitting "snags."

Untrue, and Apple refuted him a third time publicly saying Siri is on track and not delayed.



All I'm going to say to on this is that from the moment Mark Gurman started claiming it was coming in iOS 26.4, and I wish I had written this down, I said "that's bullshit."

But more than that: I said to myself, "he will claim for months, repeatedly, that Siri will 'definitely release in 26.4,' only for 2 weeks before he writes it will launch he will claim massive problems are happening, and it's now delayed."

Guess what happened? Mark Gurman is a very, very predictable and awful person. Anyone who believes his nonsense will 100% be misled. Any site that publishes his shit should never be visited, which unfortunately is most of them. Good riddance to AppleInsider, MacRumors, and 9to5Mac who don't care about anything except 24/7 clickbait

Source:

Apple's stock has worst day since April as iPhone maker faces FTC scrutiny, reports of Siri delay

The iPhone maker faces reported delays in its AI assistant and pressure from FTC chair Andrew Ferguson to look into possible political bias.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Cmaier]

at least he’s predictable.

 

[RockRock8]

I want to point this out because I just realized this.

As I stated above, he said it would come in 26.4 repeatedly only to say days later it was delayed.

The thing is, he said the exact same timeline before. I didn't realize this until now

Side note : iOS 18.4 was rumored even BEFORE WWDC as the launch date for new Siri. So him characterizing it as late even then is... dumb.

1. New Siri will come in 18.4

2. Actually they're having problems

3. It's coming in 18.5

4. A more advanced version coming in iOS 19, reminiscent of "ChatGPT and LLM basedAlexa"

Remind you of anything?

1. It's coming in 26.4

2. They're having problems

3. It's coming in 26.5

4. More advanced version in 27 reminiscent of "ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity"

That pattern is identical. That cannot be a coincidence.

He even claimed in that article about 18.4 "the true modernized conversational Siri wouldn't come until iOS 20" (iOS 27) when he was saying it was coming in 19.4 (26.4)

Side note: Oh, and he was publicly refuted by Craig Federighi saying that what they showed off at wwdc, although limited in demo videos, was real and working, not vaporware, despite him characterizing it as such ("compute generated videos").

He also incoherently across multiple articles screws up code names, mixing up efforts and renaming stuff, mixing names like "Glenwood," "Linwood," "Campos," "Campo," "LLM Siri," etc together and literally contradicts himself even in the same articles. What the hell he's ever referring to is unclear, even to him apparently.

Also:

[Earlier in article] For iOS 19, Apple’s plan is to merge both systems together and roll out a new Siri architecture. I expect this to be introduced as early as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June of this year — with a launch by spring 2026 as part of iOS 19.4. The new system, dubbed “LLM Siri” internally, was supposed to also introduce a more conversational approach in the same release. But that is now running behind as well and won’t be unveiled in June.

.[End of his article] Anyway, the follow-up release, iOS 18.5, is where the good stuff is supposed to wind up. It has the AI-infused Siri that the company showed off last June, as well as support for Apple Intelligence in China. But with all of the AI-related delays at Apple, let’s see what happens.

He doesn't even know he's saying. The "unified architecture" IS "LLM Siri," yet he says the unified architecture he expects will be unveiled at WWDC (which was wrong, by the way lol), but the "LLM Siri" won't? Also the Siri with personal context will come in 18.5, but then actually it won't, but it will be unveiled at WWDC, but actually it won't be unveiled at WWDC still?

This is so extremely confusing.

"AI Infused Siri," "Conversational Siri," "LLM Siri," "personalized Siri," "unified architecture Siri," "chatbot siri," "new Siri," "new new Siri," are ALL THE SAME THING, yet he literally splits all of those into somehow separate features and products lol.

Also I am not unaware of his bad attempt at sleight of hand. In the very same article about 26.4 Siri being "delayed" now, he attempts to weasel himself out of the claim that Siri will use TPU from Google for inference.

[Earlier in his article] Beyond those upgrades, Apple is also developing a major new AI initiative for iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27: a fully overhauled Siri that operates more like a chatbot. It will be powered by Google servers and a more advanced custom Gemini model.

[Later in] Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook hinted at even more changes down the road during an all-hands meeting with employees last week, saying that the company was working on new data-center chips to bolster its AI capabilities.

“Apple silicon is enabling us to build data center solutions that are tailor-made for our devices,” Cook said. “I will say that, going forward, the work we’re doing is going to enable an entirely new class of products and services.”

Cook was likely referring to Baltra, a long-running project to develop high-performance chips for cloud-based AI processing.

This can't be simultaneously true, especially considering other outlets (who operate similarly to him, unfortunately) literally say Broadcom is working on developing a custom server with Apple for this specific task of Siri and PCC soon, which was named by THOSE outlets as Baltra too. He's backtracking and not trying to say it.

Also you have to love this "juicy scoop" (his opinion) from the 18.4 article:

I attended the debut of Alexa+ in New York City, and it felt like seeing the first ChatGPT demonstrations three years ago: This is going to change everything. Of course, we’ll have to see how it plays out in practice. Amazon won’t actually begin rolling out Alexa+ for a few weeks and the company failed — under prior leadership — to get the software out the door last year. We’ll need to see it operating at full scale, but there’s reason for optimism.

Need I honestly say more? Makes a bold claim and then hedges immediately. Well, here you go, your "this is going to change everything" tech:

Amazon’s redesigned Alexa app is so bad I’m using Siri again

Please just add the butter

www.theverge.com

iOS 18.4 article (paywall bypass):

https://archive.ph/f5Fnk

iOS 26.4 article (paywall bypass):

https://archive.ph/PSgS4

 

[RockRock8]

I don't know if it's extremely stupidity, extremely laziness, or extreme malice, but Gurman has directly misquoted Tim Cook, and then used that as a frame for his articles

https://archive.ph/en3VL

Mark Gurman:

Now, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook says that Apple has been working on generative AI technology for years. But I can tell you in no uncertain terms that Apple executives were caught off guard by the industry’s sudden AI fever and have been scrambling since late last year to make up for lost time.

He is referring to a paraphrased quote in one of his articles with a hyperlink under "Tim Cook says." However, and I am relying on the accuracy of a transcript so might be incorrect, Tim Cook did not say this.

This is Tim: Apple’s Q2 2023 analyst call, transcribed

Every three months after releasing their corporate earnings, Apple’s CEO and CFO get on the phone and chat with financial analysts. By which we mean, they read from prepared statements and th…

sixcolors.com

Shannon Cross, Credit Suisse: Tim, can you talk a bit about AI? You know, obviously that’s more than the topic of the day, it seems like the topic of the year. Just how do you think about it through your products and services? I know you use it in different ways. But also if you can just give us any thoughts you have on generative AI and, and I don’t know where you see it going. Not sure what you want to say on it, but I’m, I’m really curious as to your take. Thank you.

Tim Cook: Yeah. Thanks for the question, Shannon. You know, as you know, we don’t comment on product roadmaps. I do think it’s very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things. And there’s a number of issues that need to be sorted, as is being talked about in a number of different places. But the potential is certainly very interesting. And we’ve obviously made enormous progress integrating AI and machine learning throughout our ecosystem, and we’ve weaved it into products and features for many years, as you probably know. You can see that in things like fall detection and crash detection and ECG. These things are not only great features, they’re saving people’s lives out there. And so it’s absolutely remarkable. And so we view AI as huge and we’ll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis.

He constantly paraphrases in his articles. That a recorded statement on an earnings call is not at all what Gurman claimed in his paraphrase in meaning or intent should concern you. How many times has he misquoted somebody from his "sources?" No one can know except him and his "sources," but suffice to say his work has a lot of problems in general.

It's also completely nonsensical. The same company that used neural networks to perform Face ID authentication and created the industry's first consumer neural network chip somehow doesn't know about transformer models? Transformer models are literally just neural networks. A specific subtype, but not so far removed from the NN's they used that they wouldn't be aware of them. It was a public paper published in academia by Google.

 

[leman]

Let me just say that there is some partial truth to what Gurman is saying. Apples ML division is not very healthy at the moment. Buying model weights from Google was a good business decision, at the same time it does not fix the fundamental structural issues Apple is facing.

I too was a bit puzzled why Gurman was pushing the line so hard about Siri running on Google infra.

 

[RockRock8]

Let me just say that there is some partial truth to what Gurman is saying. Apples ML division is not very healthy at the moment. Buying model weights from Google was a good business decision, at the same time it does not fix the fundamental structural issues Apple is facing.

Well, I think Face ID, Spatial Personas, Neural Engine are some major examples among many that demonstrate not just overall ML competency, but industry leading competency.

Are transformer models currently Apple's strong suit? No. But TMs are just one piece of a broad, important field of ML; and people like Gurman aren't exactly trying to inform people on who's leaving chatbot companies among others to come to Apple, so it looks a little more chaotic than what's probably happening.

On top of that, Apple has produced genuinely novel and innovative features of TMs (such as ASTC encoding of weights, parallel-track mixture of experts models, Guided Generation, etc), not to mention Gurman himself says that Apple developed internal trillion parameter models "on par" with leading TMs at the time he wrote it.

I also must strongly reiterate Private Cloud Compute is truly revolutionary and completely slept on by almost everyone, despite the fact that's it's working and deployed. They can, in theory, just swap in an Opus 4.6 class model and instantly be at the front. Chatbot companies cannot replicate PCC as easily (or at all). Even Google's "Private AI Compute" is absolutely nothing compared to PCC. That's a different discussion, but absolutely true.

While it's debated on this website (and that's fine), MLX is the strongest open source TM platform out there right now. The community (I just watch them) is really strong, and nothing even comes close. Awni Hannun and others are doing really amazing stuff.

TMs at this point are dime a dozen. They're a commodity. Anyone can rent cloud GPUs and produce TMs at this point (this method is used for some major open source models), and hobbyists indeed do for training data they want to make a TM for.

So with that said, I do welcome you to explain more of what you're thinking as I've explained what I'm thinking (sort of).

I too was a bit puzzled why Gurman was pushing the line so hard about Siri running on Google infra.

I don't know. All I know is I was writing a far longer comment before you replied, and I've put it to the side for one reason: his articles are literally incoherent. He claims all versions of an idea so he can never be wrong. This is why he will unequivocally state something, then paragraphs later contradict himself completely. He gets away with it because everyone regurgitates his gossip.

He constantly mixes up code names, he has numerous typos, he mischaracterizes stuff, and he will say two versions of something and claim them both as his. It's very difficult to even understand what he's saying. The only reason he's in business from Bloomberg is they don't give a shit as long as it produces effects in the industry and clicks. Blogs without thought regurgitate everything he says even if it makes zero sense. This is why I dislike him

I will say my personal theory as to why he keeps claiming that Apple will use Google TPUs is because Apple already does use TPUs. They use TPUs to train TMs (so does Google for Gemini). Apple publicly stated this. Him saying that Apple's moat with PCC will vanish, and Apple will give up privacy because they're so behind feeds into his narratives.

 

[leman]

Well, I think Face ID, Spatial Personas, Neural Engine are some major examples among many that demonstrate not just overall ML competency, but industry leading competency.

Oh, there is no doubt that Apple has some of the best engineering teems in the world. I happen to know several of them and spoke to even more, and I can attest that they are truly impressive professionals. As far as customized solutions, tooling, and infrastructure goes, Apple is the absolute top.

Nevertheless, that excellency does not seem to translate well to building large general-purpose AI models, and Apple has been lagging behind here for some time. My suspicion is that this is a leadership and culture issue, and it is possible that the same reason why Apple is so good at many things (small, focused teams working on their own set of problems) is the very reason why they struggle with revamping Siri. Communication between teams is alas not Apple's strongest suit.

I don't know. All I know is I was writing a far longer comment before you replied, and I've put it to the side for one reason: his articles are literally incoherent. He claims all versions of an idea so he can never be wrong. This is why he will unequivocally state something, then paragraphs later contradict himself completely. He gets away with it because everyone regurgitates his gossip.

He constantly mixes up code names, he has numerous typos, he mischaracterizes stuff, and he will say two versions of something and claim them both as his. It's very difficult to even understand what he's saying. The only reason he's in business from Bloomberg is they don't give a shit as long as it produces effects in the industry and clicks. Blogs without thought regurgitate everything he says even if it makes zero sense. This is why I dislike him

I will say my personal theory as to why he keeps claiming that Apple will use Google TPUs is because Apple already does use TPUs. They use TPUs to train TMs (so does Google for Gemini). Apple publicly stated this. Him saying that Apple's moat with PCC will vanish, and Apple will give up privacy because they're so behind feeds into his narratives.

I have the feeling that he got stuck on the that part of the deal where was Apple committing to Google as their cloud provider (they mostly used Amazon before that AFAIK). Now, Siri did use to run on third-party cloud. But now with PCC the context has changed. Apple is still using third-party cloud for many services. Not sure why he was insisting on this particular interpretation that much. I agree with you that Apple will likely continue to use Google servers for training and other infra stuff, but that is entirely compatible with them running their own PCC.