Comment by swyx

Comment by swyx 2 days ago

brief career timeline:

1980s - silicon graphics / general magic

1990s - chief technologist, netscape

early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)

late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google

2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)

2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof

2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push

March 2025 - removed as head of Siri

Dec 2025 - retirement

would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!

-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20

cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.

joezydeco 2 days ago

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

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next_xibalba 2 days ago

I miss 411GOOG. It was fun and felt like a cool fusion of new and old tech.

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- nostrademons 2 days ago
  
  Its purpose was to get training data for speech recognition. Once Google’s speech recognition was working reliably, there wasn’t much reason to offer the service got free.
  
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dhussoe 2 days ago

This is good context to add to the article, because he's basically at retirement age anyways. Depends a little on whether 1980s means "1980" or "1989" but with that resume I think he can afford retirement even if it's 1989 :)

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eurekin 2 days ago

This is quite a spectacular CV.

Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.

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swyx 2 days ago

the truth is ~none of us in the HN peanut gallery have any appreciation for what its like managing AI inside software inside Apple. it's less a technical role and more of an executive/politics/leadership role. im sure the disappointing progress shares a lot of blame and he was unfortunately the fall guy. estimated compensation $10-30m/yr for last 7 years tho...

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1a527dd5 2 days ago

This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".

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satvikpendem 2 days ago

Where did they fail besides Siri? The rest look like fine achievements to me.

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- nostrademons 2 days ago
  
  Netscape was the market leading browser into the early 2000s, corresponding with JG leaving it.
  Never heard of Tellme, but it sounds impressive on a resume.
  Metaweb was a good open-source fact database which subsequently got walled off once Google bought it.
  Google Search works significantly worse now than it did under Amit, and I say that as both a user and a websearch Xoogler. (JG took over about a year after I left Google).
  Siri is the subject of this article.
  
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  swyx 2 days ago
  
  can you substantiate "works significantly worse"? because obviously JG and whoever else worked on the BERT upgrade would disagree, but i am genuinely interested in contrarian takes.
  
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