Apple Sends Siri Staffers to Coding ‘Bootcamp’ in Latest Shakeup For Organization
The Takeaway
- Apple is sending Siri programmers to a multi-week AI coding bootcamp.
- Siri team has reputation as laggard, struggling with AI advancements.
- A new Siri, powered by Google Gemini, is expected to debut at WWDC in June.
Apple is sending a portion of its Siri programmers back to coding school just two months before the company is expected to unveil a major, AI-powered revamp of the voice assistant, people familiar with the team said.
The company plans to send a significant chunk of people working on Siri—a group that totals in the hundreds—to a multi-week bootcamp to learn to code using AI, according to the people. The group of programmers that will go to the bootcamp is expected to be less than 200, one of the people said.
The changes will leave around 60 members of the core Siri development team, while an additional 60 will work in a group that evaluates how Siri is performing, including handling commands from users and whether it’s meeting Apple’s safety standards, one of the people said.
The move suggests that Apple feels that a portion of the Siri organization needs to tune up its skills to take advantage of fast-moving changes in programming. AI coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have upended the programming profession, allowing experienced software developers to produce far more code than they have in the past.
In some parts of Apple, such as its software engineering organization, those AI coding tools have taken off, prompting some of its teams to allocate large budgets for Claude Code, other people familiar with Apple’s use of AI tools said.
The company’s Siri group, though, has developed a reputation as a laggard inside Apple. Over its 15 years in existence, the team has become known for its bloat and divisive politics. The group has had difficulty keeping the voice assistant competitive, especially in recent years with the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similarly advanced large-language models.
Apple has made repeated efforts over the years to reorganize the Siri to address its underlying problems. Most notably, early last year, the company took the Siri team out of Apple’s AI organization, then headed by John Giannandrea, and placed it in the hands of software chief Craig Federighi. Apple tasked Mike Rockwell, the leader behind the company’s Vision Pro headset, with directly overseeing the Siri product under Federighi.
That reorganization occurred after Apple revealed an embarrassing delay to the launch of a new Siri, which it originally planned to release in early 2025. Apple is expected to finally debut its long-awaited Siri revamp at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
The new version of Siri will be powered by Google’s AI model, Gemini, and is designed to offer a more conversational version of the voice assistant that will have the ability to directly answer questions, provide emotional support to users and help accomplish tasks such as booking a trip. There is still a lot of work to do, including on Google’s side, which Apple is in discussions with to host its servers to run the new Siri, The Information previously reported.
Separately, Giannandrea, who announced his retirement from Apple in December, will work his last day as an advisor at the company this week, Bloomberg reported Sunday.