John Giannandrea to retire from Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#31

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:13 PM UTC

danielheath wrote: post #8

gedy wrote: post #6

Was 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).

> 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

My personal favourite is Siri responding to a request to open the garage door, a request it had successfully fielded hundreds of times before, by placing a call to the Tanzanian embassy. (I've never been to Tanzania. If I have a connection to it, it's unknown to me. The best I can come up with is Zanzibar sort of sounds like garage door.)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#32

Post by rightbyte » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:13 PM UTC

LZ_Khan wrote: post #16

sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

How is that even possible with modern transcribing and natural language capabilities?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#33

Post by joezydeco » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #10

brief 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 on…

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#34

Post by markus_zhang » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

The only usage of Siri to me is to set hot spot so that it doesn’t shut down itself in a few mins. (And BTW why the f does it do that?) But it has failed to switch on Hotspot recently so I don’t use it anymore.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#35

Post by torlok » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

LZ_Khan wrote: post #16

sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#36

Post by torben-friis » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though.

Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time.

They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product.

I don't get why they went for the rush. It's not like AI is killing their hardware sales either.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#37

Post by 1a527dd5 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #10

brief 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 on…

This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#38

Post by npunt » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#39

Post by drob518 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri 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 im…

Yep. It was theirs to lose… and they lost it.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#40

Post by twodave » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

I think the main issue I have with Apple Intelligence via Siri is that it’s not very predictable anymore which things it can handle. Sometimes it will answer nuanced questions helpfully, and other times I’ll ask for it to play the only podcast in my lineup and it’ll instead play some random song I’ve never heard of. I find it more useful when I’m thinking and running and want an answer to a question, because I know I can get the answer whenever I stop long enough to pull my phone out, but in the meantime having the answer would help me work through something. I’d say my overall impression of the capabilities are negative, and it’s also not a surprise (it’s not like Apple pretended it can do things it can’t, which should have been their clue early on I guess)