This week's WWDC: New Siri unlikely? Wall Street questions Apple's AI capabilities

This year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is set to kick off on June 9th, Eastern Time (Tuesday, Beijing Time).

However, according to recent reports, Apple has encountered technical difficulties while upgrading Siri to integrate advanced large language models (LLM), resulting in the delayed launch of its core AI feature "Apple Intelligence."

Siri, which Apple takes pride in, has now become the focus of Wall Street's doubts about Apple's innovation capabilities. The upcoming WWDC may once again be a source of disappointment for investors, further putting this trillion-dollar giant behind in the AI arms race.

Siri Upgrade Stalled, "Apple Intelligence" Difficult to Deliver

According to recent disclosures from former employees to the Financial Times, Apple is attempting to enhance Siri's conversational abilities through self-developed LLMs. These technologies aim to enable Siri to respond to voice commands in a more complex and human-like manner, thus becoming a "truly conversational assistant."

However, former Apple employees revealed that numerous bugs emerged during the technology integration process, an issue that competitors like OpenAI and Google, who built generative AI voice assistants from scratch, did not face.

A former Apple executive bluntly stated that incremental development (internally referred to as "climbing the mountain") cannot fundamentally rebuild the product.

You cannot transform Siri through the so-called "climbing the mountain" approach. Clearly, they have stumbled.

Wall Street Loses Patience, Stock Performance at the Bottom

The repeated delays of the "Apple Intelligence" feature have led to a gloomy market outlook for the upcoming 2025 WWDC.

JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee stated, "Our current situation is that investors already know what the potential good news might be, but the key is: first, please deliver what you promised last year."

The difficulties in AI development have severely dragged down the stock price of this tech giant. Since the beginning of 2025, Apple's stock price has fallen by about 18%, making it not only the worst performer among the so-called "Tech Seven" but also lower than the nearly flat tech stock index, Nasdaq.

Additionally, the tariff policies of the Trump administration and legal pressures on its high-profit service business have exacerbated investors' concerns about its long-term growth.

Siri Upgrade Delayed, Delivery Still Three Years Away?

Apple's struggles in the AI field center around Siri. When ChatGPT burst onto the scene at the end of 2022, another former senior Apple employee involved in related technology development pointed out, "The way the company conducts conversational interactions is changing rapidly, and it's clear that Siri has fallen behind." Competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity not only operate larger and more powerful models, but their voice assistants are also widely regarded as more intelligent than Siri. Although Apple has launched some AI features (such as writing assistance and image generation), the most anticipated transformation of Siri has yet to be realized.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently admitted that Siri's technology has not met the company's "high-quality standards," and that development is taking "longer than we imagined." These delays have led Apple to pull a television advertisement promoting the new Siri update starring Bella Ramsey from "The Last of Us," and the company is also facing a false advertising lawsuit from consumers.

A former Apple executive stated that a fragmented leadership team has resulted in a lack of cohesion in the AI strategy, and the executives' initial reluctance to allocate sufficient budget for technological development has compounded the issue.

Bank of America analysts wrote this Monday, the current delays with Siri mean that Apple essentially needs three years or more to launch a "truly modern AI assistant, falling far behind Google and other companies that are integrating such technologies."

Brand Strategy Instead of Technological Breakthrough?

This year's WWDC seems to focus more on brand reshaping rather than technological breakthroughs.

An earlier article from Wall Street Insight mentioned that Apple is planning a major renaming of its operating system, adopting a year-based system. The company will also quietly repackage several existing features in applications like Safari and Photos as "AI-driven."

The most important AI announcement at WWDC may be Apple's opening up its foundation models to third-party developers.

This move will enable application developers to utilize the company's current on-device technology used for lightweight tasks like text summarization. However, its large language model has about 3 billion parameters (a measure of its complexity and learning capability), which is far lower than OpenAI's and even Apple's own cloud models used for its internal cloud AI functions.

Insiders at Apple are mentally prepared for a "disappointing" AI showcase at the conference, while outside observers are concerned that this release may further highlight Apple's shortcomings in the AI field