Apple is parting ways with its head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, who will retire from his position next spring after a nearly eight-year stint that was marred by the company’s A.I. shortcomings and failure to release a promised upgrade to its personal assistant, Siri.
The company said Monday that Mr. Giannandrea would be succeeded by Amar Subramanya, a former Google executive who worked on that company’s Gemini app before joining Microsoft for six months. Mr. Subramanya will serve as vice president of A.I. and report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software.
The change in leadership is the latest example of Apple’s nearly decade-long struggle to develop cutting-edge A.I. products. The company has fallen behind rivals and upstarts that are pushing the boundaries of that new technology, which has been heralded for its potential to become the operating system of the future.
Mr. Giannandrea was supposed to solve Apple’s problems. His arrival from Google in 2018 was hailed as a coup. As one of 16 direct reports to Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, he was viewed inside and outside the company as someone who could create an A.I. strategy to compete in a field that Google and Amazon were leading.
Apple wanted to make Siri a better-performing assistant. But under Mr. Giannandrea’s leadership, Apple struggled to make significant improvements to Siri. Later, it was leapfrogged by OpenAI, which released ChatGPT in late 2022, and other services that began using generative artificial intelligence to create conversational chatbots and virtual assistants.
To catch up, Apple canceled a yearslong effort to build a self-driving car and reassigned engineers to work under Mr. Giannandrea on a new A.I. system that it called Apple Intelligence. The product, which was released last fall, quickly ran into trouble. Notification summaries misrepresented news reports, leading Apple to disable that feature. And last spring’s release of an upgraded Siri was postponed because it didn’t meet the company’s quality standards.
In March, Mr. Giannandrea was relieved of his responsibility for Siri. Mike Rockwell, who has overseen the company’s Vision Pro headset, was put in charge. The new Siri is now slated for release sometime next year.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Cook thanked Mr. Giannandrea for his work and said he was pleased to bring Mr. Subramanya’s “extraordinary A.I. expertise to Apple.”
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
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