Additional reporting: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring...
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#2I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#3interesting
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#4Who? Maybe that was the problem.
What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?
Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#5Who? Maybe that was the problem. What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years? Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.
He did nothing, or net-negative. Same as Google; it was totally unclear how this guy got promoted to the level of power he had based on his history.
[Now I remember- he came in with the metaweb acquisition at a time when search was going all-in on knowledge graphs and semantics]
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#6Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#7Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.
Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl).
Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#8Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.
Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds.
Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#9Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#10brief career timeline:
1980s - silicon graphics / general magic
1990s - chief technologist, netscape
early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)
late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google
2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)
2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof
2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push
March 2025 - removed as head of Siri
Dec 2025 - retirement
would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!
-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20
cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.