Apple Losing Brains: Why Siri Isn't Getting Smarter (and Who's to Blame)

Secrecy has always been Apple's superpower, but in the age of generative AI, it has suddenly become its greatest weakness. While Mark Zuckerberg is giving away Meta's Llama model weights to anyone who wants them, and Google DeepMind stamps out scientific publications one after another, in Cupertino Apple continues to maintain silence. The result is predictable: the best AI specialists have started packing their bags. Over the past few weeks, Apple has lost at least four key researchers and one of the top executives responsible for developing Siri. The irony is that they're not going to obscure startups, but to direct competitors — Meta and Google DeepMind.

This situation has been brewing for a long time. In the AI world, a researcher's reputation is built on publications, conference participation, and contributions to open-source projects. Apple, however, traditionally requires complete anonymity from its employees and forbids sharing findings until the official product release. For an ambitious engineer who wants to move the industry forward, working at Apple today looks like a gilded cage. You can create breakthrough technology, but no one will know about it until Tim Cook shows it off on stage three years later. In a field where AI changes every week, such slowness seems like professional suicide.

The departure of the Siri team leader is a particularly alarming signal. Apple's voice assistant has long been the butt of jokes for its limitations compared to ChatGPT or even the updated Google Assistant. Inside the company, there's clearly a struggle over how exactly to integrate LLMs into the iOS ecosystem. Losing key people at this moment means that ambitious plans to "revive" Siri by next WWDC may be at risk. Apple is now in catch-up mode, and catching up without a strong engineering team is nearly impossible.

Competitors are acting aggressively. Meta offers researchers not only massive salaries, but access to enormous computing power, and most importantly — freedom of action. Google DeepMind, despite its bureaucracy, remains a mecca for those who want to engage in fundamental science. Against this backdrop, Apple looks like a conservative bank trying to hire rock stars: the conditions are good, but playing music is forbidden. If the company doesn't reconsider its approach to secrecy and give engineers more freedom, brain drain will turn into a full-scale exodus.

Interestingly, Apple has already tried to soften its rules by allowing employees to publish some machine learning papers, but based on recent news, this hasn't been enough. Researchers want to work where the future is being created in real time, not where it's being packaged in a beautiful aluminum case with a two-year delay. Right now, Apple faces a difficult choice: either stay true to its principles of secrecy and lose the AI race, or open itself to the world and risk its magic for the sake of survival.

The bottom line: Apple will have to either radically change its culture of secrecy, or accept the role of a company that buys other people's AI technologies instead of creating its own.