Siri: Apple's Trillion Dollar Safety-First Failure

One of my favorite things about tech is uncovering the little historical moments that connect the dots to where we are today.

And one of those key moments is Siri’s flash of brilliance and sudden decline.

Apple dropped Siri (in 2011—14 years ago), and it was groundbreaking. You could talk to your phone and get real, conversational answers. You thought you were living in the future.

If you can reach back in your memory, you might recall the kind of answers Siri used to give. In retrospect, some of them were wild. You could ask it questions like, Is Jesus Lord? and it would give you an actual answer.

The crazy part is: You know Apple didn’t hard-code that response. So how did they do it?

They basically had AI, they had ChatGPT, and it was just a few clicks away from what’s now turning the world upside down.

Then something strange happened. They nerfed it.

Nobody remembers exactly when, but at some point, Siri’s functionality quietly shrank. What once felt like magic turned into… mediocrity. By the time OpenAI started taking the world by storm, Siri could do two things:

1. Start a timer.
2. Copy your question into a Google search.

That’s it. Siri is dead, and only the ghost of a memory remains.

Why Did Apple Nerf Siri?

The answer is obvious: “AI safety.”

Apple didn’t want Siri answering thorny questions like whether Jesus is Lord—or anything else that could get them in trouble. Compare this to OpenAI:

OpenAI built massive filtering, safety, or censorship systems—whatever you want to call it. Even though they did the safety dance, at the end of the day they did what Apple could not: They shipped it and just let the criticism fly. And guess what? None of those critics’ opinions mattered.

While people were distracted getting ChatGPT to say drinking bleach is great or who you should vote for, OpenAI and its customers were out there creating huge value.

While one could answer the critics with arguments, the real answer is in the results: Real work getting done faster.

Apple Had It in the Bag

The mind-bending reality is that Apple already had AI. They could’ve kept investing. They could’ve been OpenAI before OpenAI existed.

But they got scared. They snuffed it out, shelved the potential, and then watched as a bunch of startups dominated the market.

Even now, when the hype around AI couldn’t be louder, Apple hasn’t learned the lesson. They hyped up a massive AI release, only to deliver a Siri that’s as useless as ever.

The Trap of Safety

This is a classic case of counter-positioning. OpenAI had nothing to lose—zero downside and a trillion dollars of upside by betting on AI.

Apple had a trillion dollars to lose. When you’ve got everything to protect, it’s incredibly hard to take a real bet. And the upside they left on the table is unfathomable.

“Safety” is a trap. Apple avoided a few mean tweets and negative thinkpieces, and lost literally a trillion dollars of value.

That success is now off the table. Now, the best they can do is play catch-up, and it’s not even clear that they will succeed in being one player among many.

Bet Against Apple?

A final disclaimer: I’m not quite ready to bet against Apple. Everybody is asking where the value will accrue in AI: The companies that make the models? That deliver the end products? The hardware vendors?

What’s insane is Apple can be all three of those categories. The potential is still there, and I’d wager they end up being a decent player in at least one of those spaces, even if it’s just the hardware that AI vendors are forced to run on.