Apple just named a new AI chief with Google and Microsoft expertise, as John Giannandrea steps down

In a fastidiously worded announcement on Monday, Apple mentioned John Giannandrea, who has been the corporate’s AI chief since 2018, is “stepping down” to, nicely, not work at Apple anymore. He’ll stick round via spring as an adviser.

His alternative is Amar Subramanya, a extremely regarded Microsoft govt who spent 16 years at Google, most just lately main engineering for the Gemini Assistant. It’s a savvy rent, provided that Subramanya is aware of the competitors intimately.

The transfer is being characterised as a shake-up. It was seemingly inevitable on reflection. Apple Intelligence, the corporate’s reply to the ChatGPT second, has been stumbling since its October 2024 launch. Opinions have ranged from “underwhelming” to outright alarmed.

Its first months had been among the roughest. A notification abstract characteristic meant to condense a number of alerts into digestible snippets generated a collection of embarrassing, unfaithful headlines in late 2024 and early 2025. Amongst different missteps, the BBC complained twice after Apple Intelligence falsely reported that Luigi Mangione, the person accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself (he hadn’t) and {that a} darts participant, Luke Littler, gained a championship earlier than the ultimate even started.

Then there was Siri’s promised overhaul, which grew to become a black eye for Apple.

A Bloomberg investigation printed in Could revealed the depths of Apple’s AI struggles. As an illustration, when Craig Federighi, Apple’s software program chief, examined the brand new Siri on his personal cellphone simply weeks earlier than its deliberate launch in April, he was dismayed to seek out that lots of the options the corporate had been touting didn’t work. The launch was delayed indefinitely, triggering class-action lawsuits from iPhone 16 patrons who’d been promised an AI-powered assistant.

By that time, Giannandrea had already been sidelined, in response to Bloomberg. The information group reported that Tim Cook dinner had stripped Siri from Giannandrea’s oversight solely again in March, handing it to Imaginative and prescient Professional creator Mike Rockwell. Apple eliminated its secretive robotics division from Giannandrea’s management, too.

Bloomberg’s investigation painted an image of organizational dysfunction, with weak communication between AI and advertising groups, finances misalignments, and a management disaster extreme sufficient that some workers had taken to mockingly calling Giannandrea’s group “AI/MLess.” The report additionally documented an exodus of AI researchers to opponents, together with OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Apple is reportedly now leaning on Google’s Gemini to energy the subsequent model of Siri, an astonishing and, presumably, humbling twist contemplating the extraordinary rivalry between the 2 corporations that dates again greater than 15 years, throughout cellular working methods, app shops, browsers, maps, cloud companies, good dwelling gadgets, and now AI.

Giannandrea got here to Apple from Google, the place he ran Machine Intelligence and Search. At Apple, he oversaw the AI technique, machine studying infrastructure, and Siri improvement.

Now Subramanya inherits these obligations, reporting to Federighi with a transparent mandate to assist Apple catch up in AI.

It’s an fascinating second for the corporate. Whereas opponents have been pouring billions of {dollars} into large AI knowledge facilities, Apple has targeted on processing AI duties instantly on customers’ gadgets utilizing its customized Apple Silicon chips, a privacy-first strategy that avoids amassing consumer knowledge. (When extra complicated requests require cloud processing, Apple routes them via Non-public Cloud Compute, servers that promise to course of knowledge briefly and delete it instantly.)

Whether or not that philosophy pays off or whether or not it has completely left Apple behind is an excellent query. Apple’s strategy comes with clear trade-offs. Amongst them, on-device fashions are smaller and fewer succesful than the large fashions operating in opponents’ knowledge facilities, and Apple’s reluctance to gather consumer knowledge has left its researchers coaching fashions on licensed and artificial knowledge relatively than the enormous troves of real-world data that gasoline its rivals’ methods.