Apple AI Chief Retiring After Siri Failure
- Reference: 0180254543
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/12/02/0021253/apple-ai-chief-retiring-after-siri-failure
- Source link:
> Giannandrea will serve as an advisor between now and 2026, with former Microsoft AI researcher Amar Subramanya set to take over as vice president of AI. Subramanya will report to Apple engineering chief Craig Federighi, and will lead Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. Subramanya was previously corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft, and before that, he spent 16 years at Google. He was head of engineering for Google's Gemini Assistant, and Apple says that he has "deep expertise" in both AI and ML research that will be important to "Apple's ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features."
>
> Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year. Cue has long overseen Apple services. [...] Apple said that it is "poised to accelerate its work in delivering intelligent, trusted, and profoundly personal experiences" with the new AI team.
"We are thankful for the role John played in building and advancing our AI work, helping Apple continue to innovate and enrich the lives of our users," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement. "AI has long been central to Apple's strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig's leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple. In addition to growing his leadership team and AI responsibilities with Amar's joining, Craig has been instrumental in driving our AI efforts, including overseeing our work to bring a more personalized Siri to users next year."
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/12/john-giannandrea-to-retire-from-apple/
[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring-after-siri-failure/
[3] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/08/22/1733230/apple-explores-using-google-gemini-ai-to-power-revamped-siri
Google to Apple? (Score:3)
Why would someone go from Google to Apple nowadays? That's like jumping from the Carpathia to the Titanic.
Re:Google to Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
I did it recently...and it was because Google laid off large percentage of my team, hired more in India, and I was now leading a team based in India. Meetings most nights and it was a pain. The executives above me said they could hire 2-3x in India for the same price as in the US, so it just made sense to move more and more jobs to India. They also sort of capped individual contributors to L5 (not a hard cap, but definitely made it difficult to go any higher). So for me, it was lifestyle (I didn't want to work evenings) and job security (Their rags-to-riches MBA from India CEO got an extra $200M+ stock package added around the same time he did all the layoffs). He really doesn't care about where the jobs are at.
The one guy who got it right! (Score:2)
Giannandrea is the one nerd in the AI world who tried to build a product around a SLM running on-device. An AI that actually considers user privacy. Apple started designing chips for on-device AI processing in the 2010s and has been shipping them in its hardware since at least 2020. This stands in stark contrast to everybody else’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on datacenters. Did he pull it off? Well, no. But he did try to find Apple an alternative to getting totally in bed with that
Re: The one guy who got it right! (Score:2)
Gemini has versions small into run on a phone too.
Re: The one guy who got it right! (Score:2)
s/into/enough
Siri is so frustrating (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like they spent all their time on cutesy little behaviors versus doing the hard work of building an actual functional digital assistant.
Anyone other than me get annoyed when you try to ask Siri something and, midway through while you're still talking, Siri decides to interject "Uh huh?" It's incredibly irritating and distracting. And then, 75% of the time, Siri either does the wrong thing or silently just goes away without doing anything.
This guy put together and managed a crappy team that probably should be let go in its entirety. I'm sure he's got a nice retirement package though, nice work if you can get it.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much.
My son says Apple does this every year around Christmastime, to get people to think they need to buy new, faster, "better" phones.
In this case perhaps I can answer, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."