pple recently parted ways with its AI head, John Giannandrea, marking the latest setback in the iPhone maker’s quest to match other tech giants’ progress in AI.
As the firm hits something of a soft reset on its AI strategy, Google and Microsoft veteran Amar Subramanya will become Apple’s new head of AI. However, the root causes behind Apple’s AI woes likely run deeper than the actions of a single executive.
Much of the criticism of Apple’s AI efforts under Giannandrea, who Apple poached from Google in 2018, centers on the company’s failure to ship a promised overhaul to the Siri voice assistant. Interestingly, Siri was first integrated into iPhones in 2011, giving Apple the potential for a real head start on other big tech firms in integrating voice-enabled chatbots into devices.
But Apple squandered its early lead and saw its AI efforts surpassed by rivals. This reality was crystallized when Apple cut a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Apple devices in 2024. More recently, Apple has reportedly been testing Google’s Gemini to power its new version of Siri. For a company known to prefer building all parts of its products in-house, the outside AI integrations may be a tacit admission that Apple’s AI efforts aren’t up to snuff. Even low-hanging fruit like AI news summaries were disabled by the company following user complaints of inaccurate news alerts.
As Apple’s AI head, Giannandrea “emphasized a research-driven culture that was relatively unusual for Apple [but] never articulated a coherent vision that would help the company catch up in AI,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources. Indeed, one of Apple’s more well-received AI releases was not a product but a paper: In June, it published findings about AI’s tendency to collapse when faced with difficult puzzles.
Apple’s AI efforts have fallen short for a variety of reasons, Krazimo founder and CEO Akhil Verghese told The Deep View. He pointed to Apple’s privacy-first approach that minimizes its access to valuable data, its limited research pedigree and unwillingness to compensate senior engineers as highly as other tech firms, Apple’s closed ecosystem making research more difficult, and a general lack of clear direction. He added that Apple’s senior leaders were skeptical about AI for “way too long.”
“This is the bit I find most inexplicable,” Verghese said. “[Apple] just did not take [AI] seriously for an inexcusable amount of time.”
Apple generally didn't use the world "AI" until 2024, preferring "machine learning" until then, and it wasn't until its WWDC conference in June 2024 that it finally articulated its product vision for AI.
In charge of righting the ship will be Subramanya, who spent 16 years at Google, eventually rising to become the head of engineering at Gemini. He was named Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI in July of this year, just five months before taking on this new role at Apple. Subramanya’s experience in integrating AI and ML research into products and features will be important to Apple, the company said in a statement Monday.
For now, investors seem to be more or less shrugging off Apple’s AI shortcomings. The stock is up nearly 20% over the past 3 months after the success of its iPhone 17 redesign, and its year-to-date performance has been roughly the same as Microsoft’s on a percentage basis.