The position covers all of AI at Apple, not just Siri.
In a press release today, Apple announced the retirement of John Giannandrea, a former machine learning luminary who worked as Apple’s senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy starting in 2018. The move comes after Apple’s most famous AI product, Siri, had developed a reputation as an embarrassing, outdated relic of the pre-ChatGPT AI era.
The release also says Amar Subramanya has just been brought on as Apple’s vice president of AI, apparently freshly poached from a position as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft. Apple says he “will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.”
In other words, the focus of the release is not just on Siri—a product released about eight years before Giannandrea joined Apple. But even after Apple has taken some big AI swings with Apple Intelligence this year, you’ll be forgiven if the only thing you associate with Apple and AI during Giannandrea’s time with the company is Siri.
Siri in the Giannandrea era has its defenders. A few days ago, YouTube tech megainfluencer Marques Brownlee uploaded a video with the title “‘Siri Isn’t That Bad’” in scare quotes, in which he very guardedly endorsed a commenter’s view that Siri is capable, but only when users meet it where it is.
