Apple AI head John Gianandrea fired

Apple’s head of AI, John Gianandrea, is stepping down after seven years on the job. Apple stock rose slightly on the news, which some investors saw as showing a new urgency for Apple to bring AI to its devices.

Following a transition period, Gianandrea will “retire” next spring, Apple said in a press release on Monday. Most of Gianandrea’s AI group will now be folded into Craig Federighi’s software development group, which is responsible for developing various operating systems for Apple devices.

The reasons for Gianandrea’s departure are undoubtedly complicated, but it’s a wonder he lasted this long. He has long been implicated in Apple’s failure to improve its Siri voice assistant and leverage generative AI to make iPhones and other iDevices smarter and more personalized.

He may have misjudged. He reportedly agonized over his preferred architecture for Siri, and how much of the assistant’s AI processing should be done on-device or on servers in the cloud. But it’s also possible that his plans to integrate AI into Apple products ran into friction with other Apple leaders or were hampered by executives’ concerns that the AI ​​generated would violate user privacy or trigger new legal exposure. In any case, by 2024, Apple’s leaders, including Tim Cook, had lost confidence that Gianandrea’s group could turn AI research into useful (and safe) AI features and products.

Before joining Apple, Giannandrea was the highly successful head of search and AI at Google. Under his leadership, the search giant began relying on AI to understand the specific search terms users prefer in hopes of returning more relevant and useful results. He was at the helm of Google’s AI efforts when Google researchers invented the Transformer language model architecture that sparked the generative AI boom and new apps like ChatGPT.

Apple poached Giannandrea in 2018 to breathe new life into its struggling AI efforts. This gave Apple the time and leadership it needed to develop its own model and bring new intelligence to its devices and services.

Apple has combined its Siri and AI/machine learning groups under Giannandrea’s management, creating a single point of responsibility for bringing AI to the company’s operating systems, services, and developer tools.

Giannandrea’s work during his first few years at Apple was kept largely secret by the company. fast companywas allowed to meet with the company’s AI group, but was repeatedly denied access to Gianandrea.

When the generative AI revolution rang out in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, Apple remained largely silent, even as its peers raced to develop their own large-scale AI models and apps.

And in June 2024, Apple announced at its developer conference that it would introduce Apple Intelligence features to its devices, allowing it to provide users with intuitive, proactive help based on their personal data. It also announced plans to use generative AI to create a smarter “next generation Siri.” For a while, hope was restored that Apple would catch up. AI revolution.

However, neither Apple Intelligence nor the next generation of Siri has arrived. (Apple currently says it’s coming in 2026.) Apple has tried integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Siri instead of its own AI, but the user experience is clunky.

In March, Apple announced it would remove Siri from Gianandrea’s control and place it within Federighi’s software group. Just six weeks later, Apple removed its robotics research group (which it hoped would lay the foundation for future Apple home devices) from Gianandrea’s AI group.

Apple believes that the Microsoft executive it selected to replace Giannandrea, Amar Subramanya, can and will get things back on track. Subramanya, a 16-year veteran of Google, led the engineering for the company’s Gemini Assistant. He has an impressive resume and could very well have a price tag to match.

His hiring and Gianandrea’s departure should be interpreted as a signal that Apple acknowledges that it is lagging behind its peers in AI and intends to catch up. Interestingly, it was Gianandrea’s resignation, not Subramanya’s appointment as the new head of AI, that drew the most attention in Apple’s press release on Monday.

Apple shares rose slightly following the announcement, closing at $283.10, up $4.25, or 1.52%.

Gianandrea’s departure has a lot to do with what kind of technology company Apple wants to be in the long term. Do you want to develop and control your own AI models, or do you want to pay and rely on large-scale AI models like Google’s Gemini?

Apple has the distinct advantage of a close and trusted relationship with its users and control over both the software and hardware, including the chips within its devices. The company is uniquely positioned to leverage the smaller, more specialized AI models running on these chips to deeply understand and effectively assist users.

Whatever the move, expect more focus and pressure within Apple to bring new AI features and smarter Siri to iDevices.