Apple said to have lured away Twitter, Palm, Kleiner Perkins veteran Michael Abbott with AI and machine learning

Apple has reportedly recruited Michael Abbott, who has a long history in the tech industry — most notably serving as Twitter's VP of engineering, and heading up Palm's webOS team.

An announcement was made internally, but the hire hasn't been made public, according to MacGeneration. It's not clear what Abbott's new role might entail.

Last summer however he wrote a blog post admitting that he'd like to return to engineering, despite his work with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

"I have come to understand that my real passion lies in the grappling to understand, develop and build new technologies," he wrote. "Like you, perhaps, I am captivated by what AR could enable, and fascinated by 'real' applications of AI/ML, or how security techniques from the world of geopolitics are influencing enterprise technologies."

All of those are fields Apple is trying to address. The company is rumored to be working on an augmented reality headset for instance, and is likely racing to upgrade Siri to better compete against voice assistants from Amazon and Google. In fact Siri and machine learning improvements would be integral to any AR plans.

Some of Abbott's other credits include working as a general manager at Microsoft, and serving a peripheral advisor, board, or investment role at organizations like Plex, Snap, and Healthcare.gov.

7 Comments

philboogie 15 Years · 7669 comments

About 6 years ago

Strange the article didn't state his resume:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelabbott/

BuddyBuild (acquired by Apple)
Jawbone
Healthcare.gov
Plex
CoreOS
Snapchat
ToyTalk

Mike Wuerthele 8 Years · 6906 comments

philboogie said:

Strange the article didn't state his resume:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelabbott/
BuddyBuild (acquired by Apple)
Jawbone
Healthcare.gov
Plex
CoreOS
Snapchat
ToyTalk

FTA: "Some of Abbott's other credits include working as a general manager at Microsoft, and serving a peripheral advisor, board, or investment role at organizations like Plex, Snap, and Healthcare.gov."

SpamSandwich 19 Years · 32917 comments

Don’t like the Healthcare.gov connection, but will be interesting to see the effects of his hiring.

cornchip 11 Years · 1943 comments

Biochemist/Mollecular biologist/Pharmacologist.

Interesting educational background.

fastasleep 14 Years · 6451 comments

SpamSandwich said:

Don’t like the Healthcare.gov connection, but will be interesting to see the effects of his hiring.

Why? He was part of the massive overhaul to fix healthcare.gov, not the initial failed launch. I have a good friend that was involved in all that. I visited the US Digital Services offices and others, met a bunch of these people, and everything I learned about how this all went down, they did a LOT to fix the base causes of why we ended up with a broken-ass website to begin with. The only people who hate on those people are the government contractor firms that suck *millions* in fees (of your money) out of the system and deliver shitty websites, or nothing at all in some cases, who ended up pushed out by internal hiring of people like this who actually got stuff done.