Apple just appointed a new AI chief with expertise from Google and Microsoft, as John Giannandrea steps down | TechCrunch

In a carefully formulated announcement On Monday, Apple said John Giannandrea, who has been the company’s AI chief since 2018, is “resigning” to, well, no longer work at Apple. He will remain as an advisor throughout the spring.

His replacement is Amar Subramanya, a highly regarded Microsoft executive who spent 16 years at Google, where he most recently led engineering for the Gemini Assistant. It is a smart appointment as Subramanya knows the competition well.

The move has been characterized as an upheaval. In retrospect, it seemed inevitable. Apple Intelligence, the company’s answer to the ChatGPT moment, has been stumbling since its launch in October 2024. Reviews have ranged from “disappointing” to downright alarmed.

The first months were some of the toughest. A notification summary feature, intended to summarize multiple alerts into understandable snippets, generated a series of embarrassing, untrue headlines in late 2024 and early 2025. Among other missteps, the BBC has Complained twice after Apple Intelligence falsely reported that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself (he did not) and that a darts player, Luke Littler, had won a championship before the final even started.

Then there was the promised overhaul of Siri, which ended up being a black eye for Apple.

A Bloomberg research published in May revealed the depths of Apple’s AI battle. For example, when Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, tested the new Siri on his own phone just weeks before its planned April launch, he was dismayed to find that many of the features the company had touted didn’t work. The launch was postponed indefinitely, prompting class action lawsuits from iPhone 16 buyers who were promised an AI-powered assistant.

According to Bloomberg, Giannandrea was already sidelined at that time. The news organization reported that Tim Cook removed Siri completely from Giannandrea’s control in March and handed it over to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. Apple also removed its secretive robotics division from Giannandrea’s control.

Bloomberg’s investigation painted a picture of organizational dysfunction, with weak communication between AI and marketing teams, budget misalignments, and a leadership crisis so severe that some employees derisively dubbed Giannandrea’s group “AI/MLess.” The report also documented an exodus of AI researchers to competitors including OpenAI, Google and Meta.

Apple yes reportedly now leaning on Google’s Gemini to power the next version of Siri, an astonishing and likely humiliating turn given the intense rivalry between the two companies that dates back more than 15 years, spanning mobile operating systems, app stores, browsers, maps, cloud services, smart home devices and now AI.

Giannandrea joined Apple from Google, where he led Machine Intelligence and Search. At Apple, he oversaw AI strategy, machine learning infrastructure and Siri development.

Now Subramanya inherits those responsibilities and reports to Federighi with a clear mandate to help Apple catch up in AI.

It’s an interesting moment for the company. While competitors have poured billions of dollars into massive AI data centers, Apple has focused on processing AI tasks directly on users’ devices using its custom Apple Silicon chips, a privacy-first approach that avoids collecting user data. (When more complex requests require processing in the cloud, Apple routes them through Private Cloud Compute, servers that promise to temporarily process and immediately delete data.)

Whether that philosophy has paid off or has finally left Apple behind is an open question. Apple’s approach comes with obvious compromises. Among them, on-device models are smaller and less capable than the massive models running in competitors’ data centers, and Apple’s reluctance to collect user data has led its researchers to train models on licensed and synthetic data rather than the massive amounts of real-world information that feeds its rivals’ systems.