Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

[flagged]

I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”.

I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue.

I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just never seems to happen.

A few quick cliffs notes plus added info:

John "JG" Giannandrea was hired over to Apple around 2018 to head Apple's new AI/ML division, which would include the Siri organization that predates Giannandrea's tenure at Apple. Giannandrea was previously the executive in charge of Google's Research division.

Mike Rockwell was hired into Apple from Dolby Labs around 2015 to head a group called "TDG" that would be the R&D and the product group for what we know today as Apple Vision, an AR/VR headset. The same organization had its own AI/ML applied research teams focused on computer vision problems, and had hired in folks from Microsoft's Hololens team.

From what the article describes, the Siri organization is being moved from Giannandrea's scope to sit under Rockwell, and Rockwell will be moving away from the Apple Vision organization.

Apple hired Giannandrea to build an organization like the one he led at Google, and appears to have found that that the AI/ML organization built at Apple struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins despite the massive financial investment. It's worth noting that at Google, Giannandrea was succeeded by Jeff Dean, and the organization was more recently reorged to become the "Google Deepmind" we know today also had the same struggles.

Vision Pro is an amazing product looking for a purpose and a market. I've opined that it's the 128K Mac of the 2020s -- an expensive toy of very little practical use on its own, that portends a revolution in computing, later versions of which really do change everything. I don't know if that's true anymore. It isn't the 1980s, and initiatives that don't make money over their first year or so tend to get axed. There's no Jobs to push the "vision thing" (no pun intended) anymore.

My guess: Their privacy centric image/strategy is a two-edged sword. You can only do so much on device locally.