Apple’s AI mess becomes a huge win for Samsung’s Galaxy AI

Samsung went in big with Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S24 series last year. It allowed the company to position the lineup as the “AI phone,” and while Apple eventually followed suit several months later with Apple Intelligence, many of its claimed features remain unavailable.

A new report reveals that work on AI has been a mess inside Apple, and the company now finds itself behind peers like Samsung, unable to catch up in the interim. This works well in Samsung's favor as it gives the company that much more time to gallop ahead with its AI development.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has an excellent report on why Apple Intelligence has been such a mess, and what the company is now doing to get things back on track. The report mentions that Apple's software boss Craig Federighi was initially “reluctant to make large investments in AI.”

Apple couldn't see a clear product case for the investment and that meant it didn't acquire enough expensive GPUs. When it finally decided to dive in, it couldn't secure enough up to them to keep up the numbers its rivals were deploying.

The company got caught napping by its competitors, apparently, as it didn't even work on Apple Intelligence before ChatGPT burst on to the scene in 2022. The company may have also underestimated demand for generative AI assistants, with Apple's AI boss John Giannandrea believing that people wouldn't want AI chatbots.

Apple then had to speed things along and it initially felt that integrating generative AI features into the existing version of Siri would be good enough, but that didn't happen. An employee quoted in the report mentioned that “You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” highlighting the complicated nature of integrating LLM-based features into Siri.

Apple's marketing department may have also overpromised while the company under delivered. Features like a vastly improved Siri experience and Apple Intelligence being able to carry context from individual apps across the system were heavily promoted but they were far from ready, and have not yet been released.

Apple has now gone back to the drawing board to entirely overhaul Siri, putting AI features at its core. The company has a team working in Zurich that's developing a new architecture that's based on an LLM engine. Apple has even made leadership changes to help achieve this turnaround. Giannandrea, who was a rare outside executive hire from Google, has been taken off Siri and project development, roles that he was hired for in the first place.

We've put many of the core features to the test in our comprehensive Samsung Galaxy AI vs Apple Intelligence deep dives, and it's evident that Galaxy AI comes out ahead in several aspects. Samsung's different approach to integrating AI on its devices has helped the company deliver a much better product that doesn't suffer from the overpromise and under deliver curse that Apple Intelligence does.

The company's close collaborate with Google has also helped it expand the usability of Galaxy AI. Google has been a solid partner for Samsung as it seeks to bring about an AI revolution on mobile with its Galaxy devices. Its Gemini AI model gets center stage on Galaxy devices and brings the power of Google's best AI work to users' fingertips.

Many of the features that Samsung has itself developed for Galaxy AI have proven to be quite useful. So while Apple struggles to right the ship for Apple Intelligence, Samsung can build upon the momentum that it already has to deliver even better Galaxy AI experiences to its mobile devices.

For Apple, this looks like a repeat of the Apple Maps fiasco, when the company decided to launch its own map platform and break away from Google Maps. The first few years of Apple Maps were not that good, but eventually the company was able to turn things around. Will that be possible with Apple Intelligence? Only time will tell.