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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

#361

Post by caycep »

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…

Weren't there rumors that Giannandrea doesn't have full control of the AI/ML house? There were entrenched old Siri folks fighting for their turf

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

#362

Post by jjtheblunt »

ksec wrote: post #237
ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…

As an ex Apple engineer myself, I've got to say the Angela Ahrendts thing was profoundly disgusting, and a partial reason i quit, despite thriving in a great team. They gave her 75 million dollars vesting over 3 years, as i recall, she did jack shit, and quit the day after all the money vested. Total failure of character judgement not only of the Burberry lady but of the hardcore engineers who believed in Apple (and I still do, but quit for cancer research work, another hobby).

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

#363

Post by PaulHoule »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #251
lapcat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS…

> It's constant change for the sake of change. This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to…

I think of Microsoft’s bad habit of introducing meaningless superficial changes to the interface but they also keep legacy software working for a long long time. (Office ‘97 works fine on Win 11)

The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks —- they updated some but kept the old ones that they did not have time to update which is a little ugly but fine because they old ones work 100%.

I used to have “who moved my cheese?” moments all the time with Windows circa 2005 when I was admining Windows and having to deal with configuration screens in ‘98, 2000, XP and various versions of Windows Server, they couldn’t resist making superficial changes that annoyed me to no end.

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

#364

Post by jjtheblunt »

xxpor wrote: post #303
kstrauser wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the tra…

I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.

Having sat beside both of them together in Caffe Macs some years ago, your assertion seemed exactly correct.

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

#365

Post by PaulHoule »

keyringlight wrote: post #310
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's constant change for the sake of change. This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to…

The way I see it is like fashion or fashion-adjacent, at least on the consumer side. One of the big accomplishments of Jobs direction is that they made computing cool, something you'd want to display instead of a functional beige box you hide away. It's not in the background, you have these colors, elegance or attention to detail on computing you want to be seen, and new major models need to be different to keep cust…

2 years ago I built an AI workstation (aka gaming PC) with all the RGB bling because it would have been harder to find parts that didn’t have the bling.

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

#366

Post by mystified5016 »

I just don't think any corporation is capable of making a voice assistant that anyone actually wants to use.

The problem is that it cannot be profitable, which is not something that modern capitalism can tolerate. The only revenue generating actions a voice assistant can take involve advertising or selling something, which is not something that anyone wants.

Users of voice assistants want to use their device hands free to do trivial things like controlling widgets, setting timers, doing simple web searches. These actions cannot be monetized, so the corporation has a decade-long crisis trying to game users into revenue generating actions.

This leads us to today. All voice assistants are useless spy engines that exist only to tell you about the more profitable things you can do with them and sell any data you accidentally give them.

With an LLM backend, the cost of running the service skyrockets and the profitability crisis will only get much worse.

What happens when siri costs 1000x to operate and still has the same usability and user count as on-device siri? Is Apple management even aware of that question?

This is probably the death-knell for siri, Alexa, et al. One hopes, anyway.

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

#368

Post by whynotminot »

viraptor wrote: post #309
whynotminot wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep talking in this thread about iOS / macOS being bug-ridden messes. I have to wonder if this is from users still on Intel chips. My work MacBook with a now 3+ year old M1 Max? Rock solid. Rarely run into any problems at all. My iPhone? Also rock solid. Rarely run into any problems. My Intel-based MacBook? Buggy mess. Like Apple has left the Intel side of the house to die on the roadside. As someone who stil…

It's not processor dependent. The OS is just buggy. Actually the only thing that is processor dependent is dtrace failing on Apple silicon and not fixed for years. Other bugs are very generic. I get focus bugs, password input box broken on lockscreen, search just not working in settings app, xcode crashing if I even look at it wrong, and lots more...

Did you see the part where I said macOS on my M1-based laptop is great?

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

#369

Post by moandcompany »

caycep wrote: post #361
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…

Weren't there rumors that Giannandrea doesn't have full control of the AI/ML house? There were entrenched old Siri folks fighting for their turf

Given the size of Apple and these orgs, plausible. Siri also had a bunch of folks that came in from outside, through acquisitions, and did their own thing or tried to identify themselves and their roles as something different from Apple norms.

Apple had teams involved with AI/ML in several divisions also, from AI/ML (including Siri), TDG/VPG, SPG...

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

#370

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ksec wrote: post #237
ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…

Going to hard disagree with most of this. At any giant company with tons of executives (the article talks about the "Top 100" alone), if you didn't have at least some misfires then it probably means you're being too conservative. If anything, I give Apple props for making management changes relatively quickly when things aren't working out.

For example, I have the exact opposite view of the forcing out of Scott Forstall, which after reading what I think are fairly accurate descriptions of what went down was absolutely the right thing to do IMO. Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch, which is an absolutely toxic trait in leadership (side note, when you're at that level it doesn't matter if the failure was "your fault", you still need to take responsibility for what happened, identify the root cause and make changes to reduce the possibility of it happening in the future). I am not an iPhone user, but every time the issue of Apple Maps comes ups, people say they love using it and that it's improved leaps and bounds over the years since Forstall was forced out.

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