BENGALURU: Apple has named Amar Subramanya, a Bengaluru-educated engineer and Google and Microsoft veteran, as its new vice president of artificial intelligence, in one of the most high-profile talent moves in Silicon Valley’s intensifying AI race.The beginnings of Bengaluru and the rise of American academiaBorn and educated in Bangalore, Subramanya earned a bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Electronics and Communication Engineering from Bangalore University in 2001 before coming to the US for higher studies.He received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2009, specializing in semi-supervised learning and graphical models. This technology is becoming increasingly valuable to companies like Apple, which restrict access to large pools of user data.During graduate school, he worked on speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and human activity analysis, and was awarded a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship in 2007. He then co-authored Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning, which is now widely cited in machine learning curricula.Long stint at GoogleSubramanya joined Google in 2009 and spent 16 years in a research and engineering role. By 2023, he led the engineering of Gemini, Google’s flagship multimodal AI model, scaling up to 1.2 trillion parameters.His research focused on large-scale NLP, multimodal systems, and voice technologies, areas at the heart of the current wave of foundational models.A short but noteworthy transition to MicrosoftIn July 2025, he left Google to join Microsoft as vice president of AI, part of a broader wave of talent moves after Microsoft hired more than 20 researchers from Google’s DeepMind division.His LinkedIn post announcing the move praised Microsoft’s “refreshing, low-self-esteem, but ambitious” culture and was widely read as a subtle criticism of Google’s internal climate.At Microsoft, he contributed to the underlying model architecture that powers Copilot, an assistant integrated into Windows, Office, and Azure.Apple now: Duty to fix Siri and accelerate AISbramagna replaces John Giannandrea, who is retiring after leading Apple’s machine learning and AI strategy for several years. He will now oversee Apple’s foundational models, machine learning research, and AI safety teams.His duties include driving Apple’s reportedly 1 trillion-parameter internal model and guiding the company’s planned $1 billion licensing deal with Google’s Gemini, a partnership laden with competitive cynicism.Apple hopes his expertise will help revive Siri, which has long been criticized for lagging behind its competitors, and close the gap with companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic.
