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Mark Gurman
7 min read
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(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation.
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Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.
Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple announced the changes to employees on Thursday following Bloomberg News’ initial report.
The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group kno
22 Comments
vmchale
[flagged]
ilrwbwrkhv
I wonder if this would help either .vision pro hasn't done better in any way
travisgriggs
I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”.
I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue.
I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just never seems to happen.
LoganDark
Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs? I get that they're a hardware company, but surely that can't be the full story. They must be suffering from some case of extreme perfectionism or something like that. I would assume it'd be very difficult to get an LLM to perform consistently and reliably without making it useless.
moandcompany
A few quick cliffs notes plus added info:
John "JG" Giannandrea was hired over to Apple around 2018 to head Apple's new AI/ML division, which would include the Siri organization that predates Giannandrea's tenure at Apple. Giannandrea was previously the executive in charge of Google's Research division.
Mike Rockwell was hired into Apple from Dolby Labs around 2015 to head a group called "TDG" that would be the R&D and the product group for what we know today as Apple Vision, an AR/VR headset. The same organization had its own AI/ML applied research teams focused on computer vision problems, and had hired in folks from Microsoft's Hololens team.
From what the article describes, the Siri organization is being moved from Giannandrea's scope to sit under Rockwell, and Rockwell will be moving away from the Apple Vision organization.
Apple hired Giannandrea to build an organization like the one he led at Google, and appears to have found that that the AI/ML organization built at Apple struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins despite the massive financial investment. It's worth noting that at Google, Giannandrea was succeeded by Jeff Dean, and the organization was more recently reorged to become the "Google Deepmind" we know today also had the same struggles.
ChrisArchitect
Guess the title was changed from earlier…. "shakes up"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425082
varunnrao
imo, Apple are actually ahead when it comes to the hardware side of the whole thing. Their vertical integration gives them an edge not many can match, when it comes to running ML models. It's a no-brainer for Apple to reduce the barriers for devs to build really cool native Mac/i{Pad}OS applications and incentivize them to leverage the built-in AI/ML abilities to a greater extent. The iPhone in part took off _because_ of the whole app ecosystem that got built around it. Sure they might take a loss in their services revenue in the short term but they get to be _the_ AI platform for at least the next decade and half – both on-device and server side with their new Apple silicon servers.
It's just that most Apple software seems to suck in some fundamental way right now. I don't know if it's a technical issue (SwiftUI being meh when compared to UIKit for example) or a culture issue or the money coming in insulating management from accountability. Software execution has been lagging behind the excellent hardware execution for almost all of the Tim Cook era. They desperately need someone like Scott Forstall to come in, kick butts and get stuff going again.
They ideally have a couple of years while waiting for Moore's Law to catch up to turn around their software side. Otherwise, it's a real shame that all that great hardware is just being used to run Electron B2B SaaS apps.
bluedevil2k
The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy – they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic Island) the choice to keep “Siri” and its negative connotations is un-Apple like.
visarga
I don't care because it doesn get deployed in EU anyway. EU-Siri is just as dumb as it has always been.
haunter
Siri can’t even answer what month it is so the only way is up from here I guess
https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jehkpm/apple_intel…
Simon_O_Rourke
Would whoever in Apple who originally setup that AI division take the appropriate "blame" for being wrong and resign themselves? Hardly.
richardatlarge
The AI issue is a perennial one: people don’t need to fix a problem they don’t have
you’d think that would be a lesson well learned by now
blitzar
rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic
JSR_FDED
Apple knows how to call an OpenAI API as well as anyone. I don't think they're struggling with the LLM side of things. The problem is to ensure security (vs prompt injection), and to create an ecosystem of apps and developers who will provide hooks into their apps to let AI perform actions on behalf of the user.
skc
I knew that them branding their AI strategy as Apple Intelligence was risky.
Because now the perception is that "Apple Intelligence" is something distinct from the state of the art.
AnonC
IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell.
There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it.
Edit: On a related note, this leak seems to be significant. The Apple I know of would fire the executives (among the “top 100”) who leaked this and probably make sure they’d pay some hefty monetary penalties too.
__loam
Hopefully the new guys take the existing GenAI bullshit and fuck off from turning it back on after every update despite me turning it off 3 times already.
siva7
I'm really buffled what makes it for Apple so difficult to cut off Siri and replace it with state-of-art technology (LLMs). Siri is still akin to a "dumbphone" 4 years into the age of "smartphones" which is a good indicator for a lost case and when it's better to start a product from scratch without the tech debt.
vessenes
We're at an inflection point in the last few months that means Apple might finally be able to do something good with Siri.
Fundamentally, Siri's great promise (well in the last few years) has been that it could hook into all of the scripting facility made available by iOS apps. There are tons and tons of AppleScript hooks on many, many apps — if only Siri could, you know, access them.
This is traditionally not Apple's strong suit – API access oriented thinking – but I will also say that it turns out to have been a pretty hard problem to actually parse out what 'hooks' to access.
We now refer to this as "tool calling", and know that it's a specific thing an LLM (or even MLM/SLM in many cases) can be trained to do a pretty good job at.
If Apple wants to do all this on device, I think we're not far off in terms of hardware and architectural knowhow to get this done now. I would bet that the Siri team spent a number of years on alternates, essentially relearning the bitter lesson.
I'd guess the best way to make this work on device would be to train and finetune a small model on a massive number of apple app store apps so that it gets good at figuring out which apps it will want to query for tooling functions calls – that's too much to inject in context directly especially on device – then it would call out for a list of available calls -> that's just code -> then it could use a local LLM to choose the proper call and call it -> then if needed it could offload for more heavyweight thinking. To start you could offload the tool call decisions as well, or really the whole thing, except for the local function call.
This would be vastly vastly better than what we have now, and I think does not require huge reintegration efforts from app developers.
"Siri what month is it?"
[… calendar_getcurrentdate requested ]
-> [ Mar 21 2025 ]
"It's March".
xvector
I worked at Apple for a couple years and it wasn't uncommon to see org level dysfunction.
But Siri is such a terrible product that it amazes me that the org hasn't been deleted, and that Siri hasn't been ripped out of products.
I have seen Apple delete bad orgs a couple times before so I find it strange they let Siri survive. It does not "have good bones," it is not a good product and it never will be.
It is actively frustrating to use and I deeply regret migrating to HomeKit as well, primarily because of the usage experience via Siri.
Truly a total/spectacular failure of an org and product. It ought to be a case study for how not to product manage.
netcan
Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in.
From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot.
Even from the perspective of 2025… most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dream. Empathy is increasingly trivial.
So Siri.. and voice UIs generally. The bottlenecks have been in unexpected places.
In general, we just don't have very good UI paradigms for voice. Voice recognition is finally good. LLMs theoretically add a lot of capability. But… there just isn't a great UI.
It's like trying to use a smartphone with a nipple mouse instead of touch. You can slowly hack your way to making specific tasks/features work… but there is no radiation event where lots of tasks become possible.
esskay
We need another snow leopard. Stop all this ai nonsense and just fix your damn os.