I do remember meeting the Siri team before Apple bought them (I was writing for a tech blog at the time) and having them show me a bunch of really cool queries.

I do remember meeting the Siri team before Apple bought them (I was writing for a tech blog at the time) and having them show me a bunch of really cool queries. I was pretty impressed. Shortly after, Apple bought them, and significantly after that, actually launched it as a product. I was not at all impressed by what launched. Keeping in mind that the pre-sale demo I got was in pretty controlled conditions (i.e. I could have been duped): After Apple's launch of Siri, someone else who had been working with Siri told me that he was really unhappy with what Apple had done; according to him, they gutted a bunch of capabilities, mainly because A) they couldn't be launched to all customers or B) just didn't fit with Apple's product vision. To give a specific example, the pre-Apple Siri could make reservations at a hotel in SF / NYC / Austin for you but not in Dubuque or Tokyo, so that had to go. Of course, that original Siri was very different from ChatGPT: it was based on structured queries and the "cool stuff" it could do was basically a ton of API linkages to outside services. At that point, there'd already been a wave of "natural language" companies like Powerset and Semantic Web that had promised the world and then flamed out, so everyone was aware that unstructured queries were basically impossible. Funny how fast things change.