Malcolm Owen
Mike Rockwell, the Apple Vision Pro chief, has replaced John Giannandrea as the executive in charge of Siri, in an executive shakeup to try and rescue Apple's flailing AI efforts.
The glacial rollout of Apple Intelligence and the lack of progress on Siri has not been a good look for Apple over the last year. Now, Apple is making a big change to get things back on track.
In an announcement to Apple employees due this week, AI lead John Giannandrea is being shifted out of his position, reports Bloomberg on Thursday. CEO Tim Cook has apparently lost confidence in Giannandrea's ability to execute on Siri's product development, so he is being replaced.
That replacement will be Mike Rockwell, who is known as the head of the Apple Vision Pro project. In his new role, he will be reporting to software chief Craig Federighi, with Giannandrea not having anything to do with Siri anymore.
With Rockwell's move over to Siri, the role of the head of Apple Vision Pro will be handed to Paul Meade, who previously worked on hardware engineering for the Vision Pro.
Ugly delays and embarrassment
While the rollout of Apple Intelligence has been slow, the lack of progress on Siri is a massive issue for Apple. With the lack of progress on features promised during WWDC 2024 and the introduction of delays, this has led to considerable internal embarrassment over the failure.
Apple has held internal meetings to try and right the ship, and has also admitted that features are happening on a slower timescale than it previously anticipated, but drastic action had to be taken.
During a recent meeting, Giannandrea told his team that the delays were "ugly" and acknowledged the staff's embarrassment and anger. There was also uncertainty about when features would actually arrive, in part due to other development priorities.
A bet on experience
By choosing Rockwell, Apple is betting that his technical experience and in shipping new products and a team of thousands will help get Siri's delays under control. A problem-solver, Rockwell had to deal with various issues to get the Apple Vision Pro to market, with some problems needing the aid of artificial intelligence.
Now, he's going to be working to improve Apple's AI efforts even more. Given he is one of the few Apple executives to go from "zero to one" on a hardware device, he has an experience that few others can boast about.
This should all help Rockwell take control at the helm of Siri, despite him lacking the background of the AI-centric Giannandrea.
Giannandrea will still be working within Apple, despite losing his Siri work. He has other responsibilities, including research and development of other AI-related technologies, along with robotics.
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51 Comments
Is he on temporary leave or just straight up out of there? (As in completely fired)
The problem isn't a one person problem but lack of investment into AI look at how AI is going every week there is a new product and things are moving too fast its not ur standard thing. Apple is already like 5yrs behind and gap is widening since AI is moving at light speed
U need a 10x investment atleast
As far as I can tell, consumer-facing AI isn't improving in leaps and bounds anymore, and probably hasn't for about a year or 18 months.
A couple weeks before Super Bowl I asked half a dozen LLM-powered AI assitant chatbots when the Super Bowl kickoff was scheduled. Not a single chatbot got it right.
Earlier today I asked several chatbots to fill out a 2025 NCAA mens basketball tournament bracket. They all failed miserably. Not a single chatbot could even identify the four #1 seeds. Only Houston was identified as a #1 seed by more than one chatbot, probably because of their performance in the 2024.
I think Grok filled out a fictitious bracket with zero upsets. There has never been any sort of major athletic tournament that didn't have at least one upset. And yet Grok is too stupid to understand this. It's just a dumb probability calculator that uses way too much electricity.
Context, situational awareness, common sense, good taste, humility. Those are all things that AI engineers have not programmed yet into consumer facing LLMs.
An AI assistant really need to be accurate 99.8% of the time (or possibly more) to be useful and trustworthy. Getting one of the four #1 seeds correct (published on multiple websites) is appallingly poor. If it can't even identify the 68 actual teams involved in the competition, what good is an AI assistant? Why would you trust it to do anything else? Something more important like schedule an oil change for your car? Keep your medical information private?
As I said a year ago, all consumer facing AI is still alpha software. It is nowhere close to being ready for primetime. In several cases there appears to be some serious regression.
25% right isn't good enough. Neither is 80%. If a human assistant failed 3 out of 4 tasks and you told them so, they would be embarrassed and probably afraid that they would be fired. And yes, I would fire them.
Apple senior management is probably coming to grips with this. If they put out an AI-powered Siri that frequently bungles requests, that's no better than the feeble Siri they have now. And worse, it'll probably erodes customer trust.
"Fake it until you make it" is not a valid business model. That's something Elizabeth Holmes would do. And she's in prison.