New York: Apple’s head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, has stepped down just as the iPhone maker is lagging behind its competitors in bringing out generative AI features on its voice assistant Siri.
An announcement regarding this on Monday also said that AI researcher Amar Subramanya is replacing John Giannandrea, The Guardian reported.
Just as Apple thanked Giannandrea for his seven-year stint, the Silicon Valley giant’s CEO Tim Cook said that Giannandrea helped ‘building and advancing our AI work’.
Apple has been slow to introducing generative AI in comparison with its competitors despite rolling out its marquee AI product suite, Apple Intelligence, in June 2024.
Features that Apple incrementally added include real-time language translation on its AirPod earphones and a fitness app featuring AI-generated voice for chats during workouts.
Despite teasing an AI-forward upgrade to Siri for over a year, the tech company has frequently postponed its rollout.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice-president of software engineering told the company’s developer conference in June that it would take more time for the work on Siri to reach the company’s ‘high-quality bar’.
Later promising its release next year, Cook announced that Apple was ‘making good progress on a more personalized Siri’.
With the appointment of Subramanya, who previously worked with Microsoft and earlier spent 16 years at Google, Apple is apparently focusing more on it AI strategy just as other companies are already making huge challenge in AI.