Welcome to the TechMe right home from Monday, May 19th, 2025.

I'm Brian McCullough today, the big, long saga of how Apple lost the AI race.

Invidia wants you to bring your own gear.

23 and me's assets are acquired.

Why are Apple and Epic still bickering and why has kidnapping suddenly become a

major issue for big crypto players? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Big Mark German Apple scoop Monday. In fact, in terms of pure word count, this is basically the

biggest ever. Mark has essentially, what is a long read, looking at Apple's failed AI efforts

and why they failed. Basically, it goes like this. In 2018, Apple made a high-profile move by hiring

John G.N. Andrea, Google's top AI executive to overhaul its scattered artificial intelligence efforts.

This is exactly the kind of person we need for AI, Craig Faderigi, Apple's software head, told staff at the time.

Jan Andrea, reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook, was meant to unite and elevate Apple's AI, especially vis-a-vis Siri. But seven years later,

that optimism has eroded. Apple's AI has not only failed to catch up, according to Mark's

sources, it's arguably fallen further behind. At WWDC 2024, Apple announced Apple Intelligence,

promising features like writing tools, emoji generation, i.e. gem mojis, and an upgraded Siri.

Yet most of these features were significantly delayed. For example, series' promised ability

to parse emails and deliver personalized responses was demoed in videos but failed in real-world

beta testing. The feature rollout was postponed repeatedly, now set for Beyond WWDC 2025.

And I would argue that even those features are so far behind what other AI chatbots can do, this is sort of meaningless for consumers.

Inside Apple, the failures sting, apparently. This is a crisis, one senior AIT member told German.

Another said, quote, it's been sinking for a long time. In addition to being behind

in features, according to internal metrics, Apple's models remain years behind rivals in terms of

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