How Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant lost the AI race
SAN FRANCISCO — On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant.
Scott Forstall, then Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” Siri replied), defined the word “mitosis” (“Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes,” it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, California.
“I’ve been in the AI field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Forstall said.
That was 12 years ago. Since then, people have been far from blown away by Siri and competing assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. The technology has largely remained stagnant, and the talking assistants have become the butt of jokes.
The tech world is now gushing over a different kind of virtual assistant: chatbots. These AI-powered bots, such as ChatGPT and the new ChatGPT Plus from the San Francisco company OpenAI, can improvise answers to questions typed into a chat box with alacrity. People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction.
And ChatGPT, which uses AI to guess what word comes next, is rapidly improving. A few months ago, it couldn’t write a proper haiku; now it can do so with gusto. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled its nextgeneration AI engine, GPT-4, which powers
ChatGPT.
The excitement around chatbots illustrates how Siri, Alexa and other assistants — which once elicited similar enthusiasm — have squandered their lead in the AI race.
Over the past decade, the products hit roadblocks. Siri ran into technological hurdles, including clunky code that took weeks to update with basic features, said John Burkey, a former Apple engineer who worked on the assistant. Amazon and Google miscalculated how the voice assistants would be used, leading them to invest in areas with the technology that rarely paid off, former employees said. When those experiments failed, enthusiasm for the technology waned at the companies, they said.
Voice assistants are “dumb as a rock,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in an interview this month with The Financial Times, declaring that newer AI would lead the way.
Apple declined to comment on Siri. Google said it was committed to providing a great virtual assistant to help people on their phones and inside their homes and cars; the company is separately testing a chatbot called Bard.
Amazon said that it saw a 30 percent increase in customer engagement globally with Alexa in the last year and that it was optimistic about its mission to build world-class AI.