Part 8/14:
Perhaps most troubling has been the stagnation in technological innovation, especially in artificial intelligence. In 2011, Apple introduced Siri, an assistant that felt revolutionary—conversational, context-aware, and intuitive. However, the company’s conservative approach to risk and heavy reliance on rule-based systems led Siri to fall behind competitors such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and later, Microsoft’s AI initiatives.
Despite its early lead, Apple’s AI evolved slowly, hampered by budget constraints and a cultural aversion to experimentation. In 2023, an internal request to purchase 50,000 GPU chips essential for training advanced AI models was blocked by finance in favor of cost-cutting—an indication of how far the company had moved away from technological risk-taking.