iPhone's future hinges on a smarter Siri

And here, Apple's Plan B for AI seems pretty great.

- Dave Lee

When all the top tech companies seem to be moving in a pack towards artificial intelligence (AI), Apple has stood startlingly apart. Its infrastructure investments haven't ballooned. The presence of AI in its products is, comparatively speaking, minimal. And when Mr. Mark Zuckerberg came knocking with huge pay cheques for Apple's talent, Mr. Tim Cook didn't do all he could to retain it.

There are two ways to look at this state of affairs. One is that Apple is in disarray, its AI products don't work because it has been caught napping on the next great tech revolution and is hemorrhaging talent as a result.

Another is that Mr. Cook is exercising restraint as others in Silicon Valley lose their heads. This week's Apple event in Cupertino, California, will be the usual affair of incremental changes to its core line-up, plus a new, thinner iPhone "Air".

The more interesting developments for the future of the iPhone are taking place behind closed doors as Apple seeks to reinvent Siri for the AI age.

The company needs to reverse the virtual assistant's status as a byword for dumb AI. No other Apple brand comes close to receiving this kind of mockery. When AI captured the world's attention, Siri's hopelessness became a serious problem.

Make no mistake, Apple's first choice would have been to solve the matter in-house and use its own engineering talent to make Siri smarter. That hasn't happened - or it hasn't happened yet, at least.

Instead, the company is now looking to outsource the task by bringing in a new tutor.