On Monday, Apple is holding its annual developers conference, called WWDC, where it plans to show customers and investors the results of Giannandrea's research into generative AI in products such as the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Apple is under immense pressure to deliver great AI products and services, and in CNBC interviews, people who know Giannandrea or have worked with him for years described him as a humble technologist who is ahead of his time — qualities that may be essential for Apple to catch up in AI.
Apple's digital assistant, Siri, is confused and struggles to answer even the most basic questions. Apple doesn't sell products like the AI chatbots being offered by Microsoft and startups OpenAI and Anthropic. It doesn't sell powerful chips to cloud companies that run AI services, such as Nvidia. Apple's shares have lagged as other companies' shares have soared this year on AI hopes. The company's shares are up just 1% this year, while Nvidia, which overtook Apple in market capitalization on Wednesday, is up 144%. Apple also lost its title as the world's most valuable publicly traded company in January to another AI leader, Microsoft.
Apple declined to comment.
Wall Street sees this as a chance for Apple to prove it's not lagging behind in AI, sparking a rise in its stock price later this year and spurring a hot upgrade cycle for the next iPhone models.
“We believe AI capabilities, combined with other Apple ecosystem investments and hardware upgrades with the iPhone 16, have the potential to boost upgrade rates and product expectations,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors this week.
Now it's up to Giannandrea and his team to live up to those expectations.
As the tech industry has become increasingly obsessed with AI over the past 18 months or so, Apple has started to talk more openly about how AI contributes to the functionality and development of its products.
“We are working with A.I. [machine learning] “These are fundamental core technologies that are built into virtually every product that we make,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in August 2023.
To date, Giannandrea's team has worked on developing AI features that run behind the scenes of Apple's devices and software, including an accessibility feature that can digitally mimic the voices of people who have lost the ability to speak, and automated editing features that make iPhone photos look better.
Ask an Apple representative and they'll tell you that the company has been using AI for years to enhance interactions on Apple devices without users even realizing it. This year, Bloomberg reported, is expected to evolve into more user-facing features, including improvements to Siri, a partnership with OpenAI to add technology from the maker of ChatGPT to iPhone software, and advanced voice controls for apps.
People who have worked with Giannandrea over the years who spoke to CNBC described him as a humble, mild-mannered technologist who doesn't seek the attention that is typical of flashy Silicon Valley executives.
His most notable start came at General Magic, a company that spun off from Apple and began making software for PDAs, the precursors to today's smartphones, in the early 1990s, and later that same decade he co-founded Tellme, a startup that offered voice-activated online information services.
TellMe co-founder Anthony Accardi said Giannandrea always seemed ahead of his time, working on technologies like running software on the cloud years before it became the standard.
“He has the foresight to realize that this is inevitable and that this is the direction we're heading in the future,” Ackerdy said.
Giannandrea, popularly known as “JG,” joined Google after the search giant acquired Metaweb, another startup he co-founded.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the “godfathers” of AI, worked with Giannandrea at Google. Hinton said Giannandrea had a rare skill set among tech executives: being both a great researcher and a manager. Hinton cited Google's breakthroughs in generative AI over the past decade, such as the ability to use AI to automatically caption images.
“He really understood the importance of it,” Hinton said.
By 2018, Giannandrea was head of AI at Google, and Apple's poaching of him that year was seen as a major coup: Within eight months, he'd been promoted to Apple's executive team, reporting directly to Cook, along with other top executives such as COO Jeff Williams and services chief Eddy Cue. It was the biggest signal yet that Apple was taking AI seriously, especially with future projects like its now-halted self-driving car effort.
So why did he leave Google, then seen as a leader in AI, for Apple? According to a person who spoke with Giannandrea recently, he didn't like how Google's executives struggled to make and execute decisions, treating parts of the business like secret labs. At Apple, he found it was the opposite: Executives made decisions, and the rest of the company pitched in to implement them.
But while in his six years at Apple, Giannandrea has avoided the kind of public appearances his executive colleagues make with slickly edited videos and dad jokes to show off the company's latest products and updates, his years of experience and expertise have earned him widespread respect among other Silicon Valley leaders.
“I still look to him for wisdom,” says Emil Michael, a former top Uber executive who co-founded Tellme with Mr. Giannandrea.
Outside of Apple, Giannandrea serves on the board of directors of SETI, a nonprofit organization founded in 1984 to detect radio signals from intelligent life anywhere in the universe. In recent years, he and his wife ran a data-center business that they eventually sold, adding another to the list of successful technology companies they co-founded.
At SETI, Giannandrea was an active and vocal executive, and even put some of his own money into funding a new project called COSMIC, which uses powerful computers to analyze radio signals from space, SETI CEO Bill Diamond told CNBC. Diamond said Giannandrea also sat on SETI's review committee and provided input into a research plan for planetary defense against asteroids.
“He's a very scientifically minded, very engineering minded guy,” Diamond said. “The questions about extraterrestrial life fascinate him.”
Several people who know Giannandrea told CNBC they would be surprised if he doesn't appear at Apple's WWDC keynote on Monday, giving the spotlight to members of his team and Apple software chief Craig Federighi.
“JG is not a showman,” a person who knows him well told CNBC. “He doesn't have that vibe.”
