Apple is shaking up its executive roster as the company desperately seeks to make an AI product that works. According to Bloomberg, John Giannandrea, senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, will no longer be in charge of Apple’s Siri and AI efforts.
After months of jokes and criticism the Apple Intelligence boondoggle has reached crisis point. If you’ve been paying attention to Apple lately, you know there is a round of blame game happening at headquarters. It’s only revealed through expertly sourced reports and a fluctuating stock as each new headline breaks through. All the reports (and a surprise leaked internal meeting) suggest Apple CEO Tim Cook has been on a hunt for why the company doesn’t yet have a competitive product in the AI space. Cook is now making changes that should turn things around for Siri, Apple Intelligence, and the rest of Apple’s AI efforts.
Silicon Valley tech giants moving roles around is definitely inside baseball, but big changes at Apple are usually learned through press releases, not leaked meetings. The very public castigating of the Apple’s AI program suggests the company might be coming around to needing AI incorporated as more than a splashy and poorly working marketing move for investors.
The company already admitted it was scaling back on its promise of a full-fledged Siri with Apple Intelligence. Now, Mike Rockwell, the former head of Vision Pro development, is being moved in as the overseer of all things Siri and AI. It’s unclear if Giannandrea is totally out. He came to Apple from Alphabet, whee he ran oversaw some of Google’s most critical and advanced AI work. So the guy knows AI better than most people, but Rockwell just shipped a product that wasn’t a best seller, but was expertly crafted and implemented and required working across both hardware and software. So as a project leader he may be more affective. He’ll will work under Craig Federighi, the ample-haired senior vice president of software engineering, who is in charge of iOS, iPad OS, and macOS.
Other staff are being shuffled between groups to get the department back on a trajectory too. What is described in the report sounds like chaos, but a shake up, or at least the admission of problems, should have happened a while ago. Critics, users and even Rockwell himself were already worried Siri wasn’t good enough.
Now Apple is betting on the technical prowess of Rockwell, the new department head, to help revive the waning Siri and Apple Intelligence and possibly even integrate it into more of the ecosystem. He also has a track record of being vocal about Siri’s shortcomings, which might mean there’s already a vision of how to proceed.
And that’s desperately needed. The Apple Intelligence rollout has been deeply flawed, with the currently available stuff being real table stakes for an AI and the actual cool big promises now delayed indefinitely. I’d like to see if they can push anything forward this year. There must be some trick that Siri can do that will inspire us all in its AI future by WWDC 2025. But if Apple is wise it will go back to doing what it does best, focus on pushing out something polished instead of rushing it out because a hype cycle demanded it.
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