Apple today announced John Giannandrea,1 Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.
Since joining Apple in 2018, Giannandrea has played a key role in the company’s AI and machine learning strategy, building a world-class team and leading them to develop and deploy critical AI technologies. This team is currently responsible for Apple Foundation Models, Search and Knowledge, Machine Learning Research, and AI Infrastructure.
Subramanya brings a wealth of experience to Apple, having most recently served as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft, and previously spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Google’s Gemini Assistant prior to his departure. His deep expertise in both AI and ML research and in integrating that research into products and features will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.
Giannandrea’s time at Apple has been … complicated. I have a feeling that his role wasn’t quite what he expected, and it is not a secret that there was friction between him and other executives. This was no doubt made worse when Apple put Mike Rockwell in charge of Siri back in the spring, but I doubt we’ll hear the whole story.
Apple was late to AI, and has little to show for its years of work. Google and Microsoft were slow too, but they’ve been able to move more quickly than Apple. Some suspect Apple’s stance on privacy has been a roadblock, but that’s one I’m personally okay with. We’ll see what Amar Subramanya can do once he’s unpacked in Cupertino.
At 60 years old and with a mountain of money, perhaps Giannandrea saw the writing on the wall and decided now was the time to step aside, but John Gruber raises a good point:
If, as Gurman reported back in March, “Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development”, why was he still there?
- All credit to Myke Hurley for my headline. ↩
