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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#31

Post by svnt »

knowriju wrote: post #28
travisgriggs wrote: post #4

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 ne…

What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?

Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#32

Post by realusername »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #22

The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy - they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic…

And here we're on an English speaking forum, I can tell you that no matter how bad you think Siri is, it's actually 2x worse in the other languages they support.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#33

Post by eru »

csharpminor wrote: post #29
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good enough bullshitter will easily answer that question.

Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake. But lots of execs don't know enough about their own products to interrogate like that. So they settle for BS presentations.

> Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake.

Yes, faking that really well is basically equivalent to actually doing it for real.

Of course, there are many good and worthwhile things an exec could have done that wouldn't show up in such a demo.

Eg if you increase reliability of your cloud services from 99.9% to 99.9999% that could be huge, but most likely wouldn't show up in a short demo.

On the bullshitting front: I remember a particular re-organisation we went through at Goldman Sachs that the local bigwig was explaining to us, and all the benefits it would bring. I made the perhaps unwise decision to ask what observable measurements we could take in a few months to tell us whether the whole thing was a failure (or success).

(I suspect the actual main purpose of these semi-regular re-orgs is to shake things up enough so that after a few shuffles person A can eventually land ahead of his former boss B, without anyone ever losing face. And that's a good thing! But hard to admit to.)

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#34

Post by kelseydh »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #22

The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy - they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic…

Agree, Siri is a damaged brand. Microsoft had the insight to drop Cortana when it flopped too.

In the age of LLMs I also increasingly view my experience with "Hey Google" and "Alexa... " with similar contempt. Their output feels so bad compared to what ChatGPT's voice gets me. All of the big tech companies seem to be struggling immensely to deploy the latest in AI advancements.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#35

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

svnt wrote: post #31
knowriju wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?

Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.

I don't know why anyone believes that the push for Apple Intelligence was driven by middle management. Sure, engineers could have pushed back because they knew more about the limitations of the tech, but engineers aren't one to understand the macroeconomics driving industry-wide demand and long-term growth.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#36

Post by swatcoder »

knowriju wrote: post #28
travisgriggs wrote: post #4

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 ne…

What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?

In this context, a "doer" might commit to an agenda, making ongoing decisions that furthered accomplishment and success on that agenda. While their nominal role is to decide, the decisions they make are organized to effect some end.

In contrast, a "discusser" or "decider" makes decisions in order to satisfy the social role of making decisions, but often with a lack of surety, clarity, follow-through or commitment. Perhaps in fear of missing some greater opportunity, or fear of being credited with some failure, their decisions are not organized in a way that actually effects some end.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#37

Post by kelseydh »

varunnrao wrote: post #15

imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing. Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models. It's a no-brainer for Apple to reduce the barriers for devs to build really cool native Mac/i{Pad}OS applications and incentivize them to leverage the built-in AI/ML abilities to a greater extent. The iPhone in part took off _because…

A lot of people forget that it was only recently that the Photos app on your iPhone could run OCR text search on pictures in your phone. Google had that feature on their phones many years before Apple.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#38

Post by ricknroll »

moandcompany wrote: post #6

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 a…

„[…]struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins […]“

working in AI/ML, is there any recommended literature one may read on how to ensure efforts result in products? Would be interested to access more experience to benefit both an engineer and a manager pathway.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#39

Post by LeoPanthera »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #30
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. Apple just doesn’t have anything like that with AI. Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid re…

> Given that, Apple is stuck trying to catch up to the rest of the products in the AI space Oh, of course. Like...? Nothing else has access to relevant data. That's like 95% of the pitch of siri. Voice assistants are just fundamentally embarrassing to use, imo. The only exception of which I can think is while driving.

Gemini has access to your Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Keep, and Tasks, as well as Flights, Hotels, Maps, YouTube, YouTube Music, OpenStax, and of course the entire web more generally.

> Nothing else has access to relevant data.

Simply not true.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#40

Post by kgwgk »

svnt wrote: post #31
knowriju wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?

Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.

I’d be surprised to find “middle managers” at all among the top 100 senior leaders of a company with 150k+ employees,
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