Apple Sends Nearly 200 Siri Engineers Back to 'Coding School' Just Two Months Before New Siri Version Launch

According to Dongcha Beating monitoring, Apple plans to send nearly 200 Siri programmers to attend a multi-week AI programming training camp to learn how to code with AI tools. This comes as the launch of the new version of Siri is expected at WWDC in June, just two months away. The Siri team currently consists of several hundred members, and after the training, the core development group will retain only about 60 people, while another 60 will move to the evaluation group responsible for testing Siri's command processing and security compliance.

Apple's software engineering and other departments have widely adopted AI programming tools like Claude Code, with significant budget allocations to some teams, but the Siri team has lagged behind. Internally, this team is known as the "laggard," with bloated personnel and internal political divisions, making it even more challenging to stay competitive after the rise of large language models like ChatGPT. Apple has restructured the Siri team multiple times in recent years: early last year, the team was moved from AI chief John Giannandrea to software head Craig Federighi, with Vision Pro lead Mike Rockwell directly in charge of Siri product. Previously, Apple had planned to launch the new version of Siri in early 2025 but faced delays. Giannandrea announced his retirement last December, and according to Bloomberg, this week will be his last day at Apple as an advisor.

The new Siri version will be powered by Google's Gemini, supporting more natural conversations, direct question answering, providing emotional support, and completing tasks such as bookings. Apple is currently in discussions with Google to have the latter host and run the new Siri on its servers, with a significant amount of work still to be done. For a company known for its in-house chips and operating systems, relying on a competitor's models and servers to operate a voice assistant, and having the Siri team learn to code with AI through a training camp, exemplifies Apple's predicament in the era of generative AI.