Apple released an internal memo on Monday confirming that Chief AI Officer John Giannandrea will step down in the spring, remaining only as a consultant; his position will be immediately taken over by Amar Subramanya, former head of Gemini engineering at Google, who will report directly to Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi.
This personnel change is seen as a response to repeated failures in the "Apple Intelligence" project. Since its launch in October 2024, the system has faced criticism due to false headlines appearing in its summary function — the BBC filed two complaints about erroneous reports, and a major update to Siri was indefinitely postponed due to unsatisfactory internal testing, leading to a class-action lawsuit from iPhone 16 users. Bloomberg previously reported that CEO Tim Cook had already transferred the Siri business from Giannandrea to Mike Rockwell, head of Vision Pro, in March of this year, and the AI/ML team was humorously referred to as "AI/MLess."
Subramanya spent 16 years at Microsoft and Google, most recently leading the Gemini Assistant engineering team, and is seen as a key figure familiar with competitors' technology stacks. Apple hopes this leadership change will accelerate its efforts to catch up and plans to introduce the Google Gemini model as a cloud-based inference backend in the next generation of Siri, shifting from its previous self-developed approach.
Apple still emphasizes its "device-first" strategy: running lightweight models locally on custom Apple Silicon chips, and handling complex requests through Private Cloud Compute, which does not store user data. However, insiders have acknowledged that this privacy-focused approach limits model size and training data, resulting in performance that lags behind competitors who excel in large-scale data center models.
Subramanya's primary task upon taking office is described as "rebuilding the technical roadmap and team morale," while also improving the level of intelligence in cloud and device collaboration without compromising privacy commitments. The market is watching closely to see if Apple's AI can reverse its decline.
