Apple has announced a major leadership shake-up in its AI division, revealing on Monday that longtime AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down after seven years at the company. He will remain as an adviser through the spring.
Giannandrea’s replacement is Amar Subramanya, a highly respected Microsoft executive who previously spent 16 years at Google, most recently leading engineering for the Gemini Assistant. The move is widely seen as a strategic hire, placing someone deeply familiar with Apple’s biggest AI competitors at the helm.
A Shake-Up Years in the Making
Apple Intelligence, Apple’s flagship generative AI initiative, has been struggling since its October 2024 launch. Early reviews were mixed to negative, with several embarrassing incidents involving wrongly generated headlines and inaccurate notification summaries. The BBC filed multiple complaints after Apple Intelligence incorrectly reported false developments in high-profile news stories.
Siri’s long-promised overhaul also collapsed internally. A Bloomberg investigation revealed that, weeks before launch, key features simply didn’t work on Apple software chief Craig Federighi’s own test device. The release was delayed indefinitely, triggering class-action lawsuits from iPhone 16 buyers who were promised an upgraded AI assistant.
According to Bloomberg, Giannandrea’s influence had been declining for months. Siri was moved under the leadership of Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, and Apple’s secret robotics division was removed from his oversight entirely. Internally, morale reportedly sank so low that some employees jokingly referred to the AI organization as “AI/MLess.”
Organizational Strain and Talent Loss
Bloomberg also detailed deep-seated dysfunction across Apple’s AI operations, citing poor communication between AI and marketing teams, budget bottlenecks, and a wave of resignations. Several high-level AI researchers have defected to rivals including OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Perhaps most striking is the report that Apple is now leaning on Google Gemini to power the next version of Siri, a stunning twist in a rivalry dating back more than a decade across smartphones, browsers, cloud services, and now AI.
Related:Apple’s App Store Gets A New Web Interface
A High-Stakes Mandate for Subramanya
Subramanya will oversee Apple’s AI strategy, machine learning infrastructure, and Siri development, reporting directly to Federighi. His job: help Apple regain ground in an AI race dominated by competitors investing billions in cloud-based AI supercomputing.
Apple, meanwhile, has focused on privacy-first, on-device AI, processing most tasks locally on Apple Silicon chips. While this avoids collecting user data, it also limits the size and capability of the models Apple can run, leaving the company reliant on synthetic and licensed data instead of the massive real-world datasets fueling competitors’ breakthroughs.
The Big Question Ahead
Whether Apple’s privacy-first strategy can succeed, or whether its refusal to embrace large-scale data collection has left it permanently behind, remains uncertain.
What is clear is that Subramanya steps into one of Apple’s most critical roles at one of its most challenging moments, with Apple’s entire AI future hanging in the balance.
