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Apple Removes Former AI Chief John Giannandrea From Executive Leadership Page

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Apple today updated its executive leadership page to remove John Giannandrea, who is set to retire from Apple next spring. Earlier this week, Apple said that Giannandrea would step down from his role as AI chief, serving as an advisor until he leaves the company.

hey-siri-banner-apple.jpg

Giannandrea's upcoming retirement was announced on Monday, and Apple wasted no time updating its leadership website. Former Microsoft Corporate VP of AI Amar Subramanya is set to take over as Apple's vice president of AI, but he is not yet listed on the site. Subramanya will report to software engineering chief Craig Federighi.

Some of the teams that Giannandrea led are being shifted to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, including AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge.

Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as the company's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. He was overseeing Siri, Core ML, and other AI efforts at Apple. Before Apple, Giannandrea worked at Google as a senior vice president of engineering.

After the iOS 18 Siri failure, Giannandrea's retirement comes as no surprise. Apple announced new Apple Intelligence Siri features at WWDC when it unveiled iOS 18, and then used those unreleased features to market the iPhone 16 models. In spring 2025, when we were expecting the launch of the promised functionality, Apple said the smarter version of Siri wasn't ready and announced a year-long delay.

More than half a dozen former employees who worked on Apple's AI team told The Information the issues with Siri stemmed from poor leadership, stringent privacy practices, conflicting personalities, and indecision. Apple hasn't publicly commented on the situation, but stripped Siri from Giannandrea in March and overhauled the Siri team. Apple also removed Giannandrea from its robotics division in April.

Article Link: Apple Removes Former AI Chief John Giannandrea From Executive Leadership Page
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/03/apple-removes-giannandrea-executive-page/
  • Haha
Reactions: antiprotest
Apple's leadership group members are either retiring or going to Meta. People talk about Jobs being an evil man, but I never saw this many people leaving while Jobs was the CEO.

When you see continuous exodus from an organization, it is on the top leader. Cookmight be a great op guy, but he is probably a not a great #1. Apple needs to act fast.
 
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Reactions: FAM9, Jovijoker, Blackstick and 14 others
gleepskip said:
They clearly want to lay all the blame for their AI failures on Giannandrea. I wonder if that is accurate.
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If Apple Intelligence continues to be bad now that Giannandrea is done, you'll have your answer. I wonder why he is given the dignity of being able to stay around as an advisor when any lower level Apple employee would be kicked out ASAP. I think Scott Forstall got to stay around for about a year as an advisor too.
 
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Reactions: progx and Blackstick
Guess they couldn't put the new guy's picture up because they took the photo yesterday and now they need to spend the time on pixelmator pro (learning how to use it) to clean it up.
 
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Reactions: Rradcircless
syklee26 said:
Apple's leadership group members are either retiring or going to Meta. People talk about Jobs being an evil man, but I never saw this many people leaving while Jobs was the CEO.

When you see continuous exodus from an organization, it is on the top leader. Cookmight be a great op guy, but he is probably a not a great #1. Apple needs to act fast.
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Meta is becoming a retirement home for Apple executives.
 
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Reactions: Blackstick, Rradcircless, JaydenA and 4 others
The guy was hired away from Google because he had been in charge of machine learning (early words for AI) back then, hoping he could supercharge and reform Siri. That obviously never happened, and with Apple Intellligence lagging so badly, he clearly had to go. This was a firing masked as retirement. While Craig Federighi is pretty popular with Apple fans, I’m starting to wonder if he needs to “retire” as well. Software quality overall has been lacking under his watch.
 
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Reactions: Blackstick, michaelnugent, Morod and 9 others
Good. Now fire lower level management in charge of iOS and the other software, for their incompetence in making software stable.
 
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Reactions: Blackstick
Has there been more churn at Apple recently? It seems like there have been lots of top executives disappearing. Back in the early 2000s, it seemed like all the Apple executives stayed put. But they were all much younger then. Maybe it's just because so many of them have hit retirement age.
 
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Reactions: Blackstick, H3boy and Rradcircless
Black_Mage said:
If Apple Intelligence continues to be bad now that Giannandrea is done, you'll have your answer. I wonder why he is given the dignity of being able to stay around as an advisor when any lower level Apple employee would be kicked out ASAP. I think Scott Forstall got to stay around for about a year as an advisor too.
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Likely has an employment contract, so the “advisor” role is basically a place to park them and maybe utilize their talents elsewhere until the contract is up.

Plutonius said:
Why not get rid of him immediately ?
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They likely have a contract and are not at-will.
 
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Reactions: KeithBN and Plutonius
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