Apple Pushes Back on Siri Delay Reports
Apple is publicly reaffirming its plan to launch an overhauled Siri in 2026, pushing back on reports of further delays. While some sources claim internal glitches and a shifting schedule could push the release to late 2026, the company insists the project remains "on track." The revamp aims to deliver a leap in context awareness and on-device intelligence integrated with Apple Silicon.
- The revamped Siri is part of a broader suite of AI tools known internally as "Project Greymatter," which will be integrated into core apps like Safari, Photos, and Notes. For more complex tasks, Apple will utilize a hybrid model, processing some requests in the cloud using servers powered by M2 Ultra chips. - Apple's foundational AI model framework is internally codenamed "Ajax" and was developed using Google's JAX machine learning framework. This initiative is a significant investment for Apple, with the company reportedly spending millions of dollars daily on training these models. - The AI leadership for this initiative has seen some changes. John Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018 to lead AI and machine learning strategy, is set to retire in the spring of 2026. Amar Subramanya, a former AI executive from Microsoft and Google, will take over as VP of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering. - The new Siri is expected to have "onscreen awareness," allowing it to understand and act on content displayed in various apps. It will also be able to handle more complex, multi-step commands and have a more natural, conversational interaction style. - A significant technical hurdle is optimizing powerful large language models to run efficiently on-device, which is a core tenet of Apple's privacy-focused AI strategy. To achieve this, Apple is leveraging the Neural Engine in its A-series and M-series chips and employing techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LORA) to specialize the model for various tasks without needing a full retrain. - The initial rollout of the revamped Siri is anticipated with iOS 26.4, with further enhancements expected in subsequent updates like iOS 27. Some reports suggest a phased release of features due to the complexity of the project. - For developers, Apple is providing a new Foundation Models framework, allowing them to integrate on-device AI capabilities into their apps with just a few lines of Swift code. This framework supports a language model with approximately 3 billion parameters, optimized for Apple Silicon. - While much of the processing will happen on-device, Apple is partnering with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT for handling more complex queries that require extensive world knowledge. There have also been discussions with Google to potentially offer its Gemini model as another option.
