From the high profile in the middle of the year to the release of "light AI" products in September, Apple's AI has stalled amid ups and downs in the past six months. Recently, Apple's top AI executives have been shaken again: Robby Walker, the former head of Siri and a senior AI executive, is about to leave.
Walker is one of the few direct reports to AI chief John Giannandrea.
He has been in charge of this voice assistant since 2022.
But earlier this year, Walker was withdrawn from the project due to delays in the release of the new version of Siri.
The project was then handed over to software lead Craig Federighi.
According to people familiar with the matter, Walker plans to leave Apple next month.
From Siri to "AKI"
On October 4, 2011, the day after Apple launched Siri, Jobs died after a long battle with cancer.
Since then, the Siri team has lost its original vision—not only has progress been slow, but the people in charge have also changed frequently.
In 2013, Apple acquired personal assistant app startup Cue. Founder Robby Walker and his team also joined.
Seven years later, Walker was promoted to senior director of the Siri team.
In 2025, Walker was transferred to the newly established "Answers, Information and Knowledge" (AKI) team as senior director.
As the name suggests, the core mission of this team is to build a new "answer engine" that can not only understand questions and integrate information, but also directly generate answers like ChatGPT.
Different from ChatGPT with plug-in access, what AKI needs to do is to reconstruct from the bottom up and redefine the "Apple-style AI search experience."
In a sense, this is the first time that Apple is no longer "relying on others to answer", but is trying to truly master the answer itself.
According to a previous report by The Information, during his tenure as head of Siri, Walker became the focus of criticism within Apple for his unwillingness to take greater risks.
Strategies come up frequently, but implementation stalls
Although Walker's responsibilities and team have been significantly reduced in the past few months, he remains an influential member of Apple's AI strategy.
Walker's departure is a microcosm of the wave of resignations of executives and engineers in Apple's AI department.
Previously, Ruoming Pang, who led Apple's AI model team, had switched to Meta, and many engineers and researchers under him also left.
Last month, Frank Chu, another senior executive responsible for search services, also joined Meta.
In the past six months, Apple has made frequent AI strategic moves.
Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering
In April, former Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell took over the Siri project and reorganized the team. Siri coordinator returned to the line of software engineering director Craig Federighi, indicating that the voice assistant project was "upgraded and rectified."
In May, Apple reported that it was developing AI server chips to coordinate the deployment of AI capabilities in device-cloud collaboration, which is a forward-looking layout of underlying computing power and supply chain.
In June, Apple evaluated using Anthropic or OpenAI models to power the new version of Siri. The project was evaluated by Rockwell and Federighi.
However, the pace of its AI implementation has also raised questions.
Especially after the "light AI" tone of its new product launch in September, D.A. Davidson downgraded Apple's rating to neutral on the grounds that "AI progress is not as good as expected."
Since June 2024, when Apple first demonstrated the new Apple Intelligence at WWDC, it has not launched new Siri upgrade features.
Apple said it plans to launch its delayed personalized Siri feature in the spring of 2026, attributing the reason to ongoing quality issues in testing the new Siri feature and that it will switch to a more robust underlying architecture to address these issues.
The departure of Robby Walker, coupled with factors such as delays in Siri updates, further amplified the outside world's doubts about Apple's AI innovation and implementation speed.