In a press release today, Apple announced the retirement of John Giannandrea, a former machine learning luminary who worked as Apple’s senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy starting in 2018. The move comes after Apple’s most famous AI product, Siri, had developed a reputation as an embarrassing, outdated relic of the pre-ChatGPT AI era.
The release also says Amar Subramanya has just been brought on as Apple’s vice president of AI, apparently freshly poached from a position as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft. Apple says he “will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.”
In other words, the focus of the release is not just on Siri—a product released about eight years before Giannandrea joined Apple. But even after Apple has taken some big AI swings with Apple Intelligence this year, you’ll be forgiven if the only thing you associate with Apple and AI during Giannandrea’s time with the company is Siri.
Siri in the Giannandrea era has its defenders. A few days ago, YouTube tech megainfluencer Marques Brownlee uploaded a video with the title “‘Siri Isn’t That Bad’” in scare quotes, in which he very guardedly endorsed a commenter’s view that Siri is capable, but only when users meet it where it is.
And in Siri’s defense, it has a solution for the kinds of general purpose LLM tasks some people have started to use AI for in their daily lives, but it only emphasizes how far behind the competition it is. Starting in iOS 18.2 almost exactly a year ago, certain Siri prompts started just getting handed over to ChatGPT. So now if you ask Siri to tell your five-year old a bedtime story about a duck, Siri will just tag in ChatGPT. That’s got to be a little deflating for Giannandrea.
After all, as Gizmodo’s Tom McCay wrote back in 2018, Giannandrea was Google’s chief of search until Apple poached him in 2018 in an effort to rapidly catch up to companies with more “effective” digital assistants like Google Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa. Seven years later, instead of besting the competition, Siri just pulls a ripcord and uses ChatGPT as a parachute.
Earlier this year, it emerged that Giannandrea was no longer in charge of Siri. Then last month came the leaked story that apparently the next Siri wasn’t going to be built atop Apple’s own AI at all, and that Apple was going to pay Google for a new core AI model to serve as neo-Siri’s main ingredient.
Subramanya seems to be replacing Giannandrea even though his title is slightly different. He worked on Google Gemini during his 16 years at Google, which makes it sound as if the new Siri, when it’s released, will at least have the fingerprints of Apple’s current head of AI in its code somewhere.
But once again, it feels like Apple is playing catch-up rather than leading in this particular space. Siri was made in an era where deterministic responses to a small set of voice commands was impressive. It has branched out to other tasks, but with Giannandrea at the helm it mostly just got noticeably outshined by more flexible chatbot-based assistants. It looks like soon, Siri will finally be able to perform those open-ended LLM tasks that Apple never really tackled during the Giannandrea regime, and Subramanya will be able to take credit. But assuming Siri catches up to the 2026 standard for voice assistants, how long will that feel good enough?
Giannandrea’s retirement will take effect in spring of next year, Apple’s release says.
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