Apple’s head of artificial intelligence, John Gianandrea, is leaving the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant lags its competitors in rolling out generative AI capabilities, particularly voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven years with the company.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said his fellow executives helped “build and advance the company’s AI efforts” and enabled the company to “continue to innovate.” Gianandrea will be replaced by Amar Subramanya, a longtime AI researcher.
Apple debuted its major AI product suite, Apple Intelligence, in June 2024, but the company has been slow to overhaul its products with generative AI compared to competitors like Google. Apple has been adding incremental features, such as real-time language translation on new AirPod earbuds, a feature added to Google’s headphones in 2017, and a fitness app that uses AI-generated voices to chat during workouts, but big changes are still in development.
The company has been teasing AI-powered upgrades to Siri for more than a year, but the rollout has been repeatedly delayed.
“This work is [on Siri] We needed more time to get to that high quality level,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, said at the company’s developer conference in June.
In an earnings call the following month, Cook said Apple was “on track to make a more personalized Siri” and promised a release next year.
Subramanya’s appointment appears to signal that Apple will put more emphasis on its AI strategy. Mr. Subramanya previously served as Vice President of AI at Microsoft and also spent 16 years at Google, where he was Head of Engineering for Gemini AI Assistant, considered an industry leader. He will report to Apple’s head of engineering, Craig Federighi, who has taken on a larger role in the company’s AI efforts in recent years.
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Cook said Monday that Federighi is “helping us advance our AI efforts, including overseeing our efforts to bring personalized Siri to our users starting next year.” In its announcement, Apple wrote that this is a “new chapter” for the company as it “intensifies its efforts” in AI.
