John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
(apple.com)153 points by robbiet480 2 days ago
Additional reporting: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring...
153 points by robbiet480 2 days ago
Additional reporting: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring...
ChatGPT does not help with the system integration it's just an afterthought.
It could potentially help tremendously but for that they would need to understand the usefulness of LLMs and tool usage.
"couldnt even" is a high bar. it is an unsolved problem to make small models (truly, no bullshit) perform at human intelligence level than to make large models do the same. the bar JG had to pass was a bit lower than that, but Apple's marketing team unfortunately overpromised.
Even if you have all the money in the world, it's still crucial to put the right people in the right places.
When is Tim Apple retiring? Put an engineer in charge so they can fix Apple's rotting software.
This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like.
I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.
I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).
At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?
He was at Microsoft for a few months, and Google for 16 years before that.
I worked pretty closely with him and his team for a bit at Google, and he seemed like a great human being, in addition to being a great engineer. I wouldn't read too much into a few-month stint at Microsoft.
I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.
Aside from all the 365 subscription prices turning into “+ Copilot” editions and silently going up in price like 20%, that you then have to access hidden flows to opt-out of, right?
Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.
Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever.
We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.
In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.
Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.
People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.
We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.
But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s
Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.
Yeah, not attributing it to him, just his lack of being able to do anything with it. Could have been Apple Politics. Could have been a number of things.
Still. Idle hands, he should get back on that horse if he can. Go do more stuff.
I worked with JG. He was a good guy. Got no idea what happened at Apple, but I have nothing but good feelings from when I knew him 25 years ago.
Wow, come to think of it, Siri failed; ChatGPT completely eclipsed the tool.
He did nothing, or net-negative. Same as Google; it was totally unclear how this guy got promoted to the level of power he had based on his history.
[Now I remember- he came in with the metaweb acquisition at a time when search was going all-in on knowledge graphs and semantics]
"Hey Siri, stop playback"
...
...
...
Siri disappears and song continues playing
...
"Hey Siri, stop playback"
Songs stops playing.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114144
Siri is doomed by Apple global strategy. Even if they really make it to work, it would work only in a few selected languages which is a parody of AI these days. They are living in 90s when only a few languages were important
So what is going on here? The reason is definitely not that Apple couldn't even train a small local LLM to power Siri, right?