Apple executives struggle to explain why Siri can’t compete with ChatGPT

Apple executives Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak struggled to explain the company’s continued delays in delivering a significantly improved Siri during a Wall Street Journal interview following WWDC 2025. The tech giant’s AI assistant remains far behind competitors like ChatGPT, despite promises of major upgrades that were later retracted due to reliability concerns.

The big picture: Apple’s cautious approach to AI development has left it trailing significantly behind competitors who have already deployed conversational AI tools, raising questions about whether the company’s perfectionist standards are hindering innovation in a rapidly evolving market.

What went wrong: Apple’s attempt at a conversational Siri simply didn’t meet quality standards despite having working prototypes.

• “We had something working, but then, as you got off the beaten path… and we know with Siri, it’s open-ended what you might ask it to do,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, explained.
• The company pulled an iPhone 16 ad in March that made promises for advanced Siri capabilities, admitting the technology was “going to take us longer than we thought.”
• A purported “V1” of conversational Siri “didn’t converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to,” according to Federighi.

Apple’s defense: The executives emphasized reliability over speed to market, citing concerns about AI hallucinations and error rates.

• “Look, we don’t wanna disappoint customers,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing head, told the WSJ. “We never do. But it would’ve been more disappointing to ship something that didn’t hit our quality standard, that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable.”
• “No one’s doing it really well right now,” Federighi said. “And we wanted to be the first. We wanted to do it best.”

Current reality: Siri remains limited to basic tasks like setting timers and sending messages while competitors offer advanced capabilities like code generation and document analysis.

• Apple’s latest “Apple Intelligence” features include image scanning and custom emoji creation—functionality that falls short of OpenAI’s ChatGPT capabilities.
• The company has been known for its “slow-and-steady-wins-the-race” approach to new technology adoption.

Industry context: Apple’s struggles reflect broader challenges with AI reliability that have affected multiple tech companies.

• AI chatbots continue to hallucinate—meaning they generate false or misleading information—and cause problems their creators never anticipated.
• Apple recently published research questioning the “reasoning” capabilities of large language models, the AI systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT.
• Companies have faced controversies over AI chatbots causing mental health crises and other unintended consequences.

What’s at stake: The delay highlights Apple’s access to highly personal user data and the risks of deploying unreliable AI systems at scale, while also raising questions about whether current AI approaches can ever meet Apple’s quality standards.