The release also said that Amar Subramaniam has recently been brought on as Apple’s vice president of AI, apparently coming from his recent position as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft. Apple says he will be “critical to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.”
In other words, the focus of the release isn’t just on Siri — that product was released nearly eight years before Giannandrea joined Apple. But even after Apple made some big AI changes this year with Apple Intelligence, you’d be forgiven if you only associated Siri with Apple and AI during Giannandrea’s time with the company.
Siri has its protectors in the Gianandrea era. A few days ago, YouTube tech megainfluencer Marques Brownlee uploaded a video with the title “‘Siri Isn’t That Bad'” in scare quotes, in which he very carefully supported a commenter’s idea that Siri is capable, but only if users meet it where it belongs.
And in Siri’s defense, it does have a solution for those general purpose LLM tasks for which some people have started using AI in their daily lives, but that only emphasizes how far behind the competition it is. Starting in iOS 18.2, almost exactly a year ago, some Siri prompts just started being assigned to ChatGPT. So now if you ask Siri to tell your five-year-old a bedtime story about a duck, Siri will just tag in ChatGPIT. That will be some relief for Giannandrea.
After all, as Gizmodo’s Tom McKay wrote in 2018, Giannandrea was Google’s head of search until Apple took him over in 2018 in an effort to catch up to companies with more “effective” digital assistants like Google Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa. Seven years later, instead of besting the competition, Siri just pulls a ripcord and uses ChatGPT as a parachute.
Earlier this year, it emerged that Giannandrea was no longer in charge of Siri. Then came the leaked story last month that apparently the next Siri wouldn’t be built on Apple’s own AI at all, and that Apple was going to pay Google for a new core AI model to serve as the core component of neo-Siri.
Subramaniam appears to be replacing Gianandrea, albeit with a slightly different title. He worked on Google Gemini during his 16 years at Google, which makes it seem as if the new Siri, when released, will have at least the fingerprints of Apple’s current head of AI in its code.
But once again, it feels like Apple is playing catch-up rather than leading in this particular area. Siri was created in an era where deterministic responses to a small set of voice commands were dominant. It has also branched out into other functions, but under Giannandrea’s leadership it has mostly been clearly overshadowed by more flexible chatbot-based assistants. It seems that soon, Siri will finally be able to perform those open-ended LLM tasks that Apple never really tackled during the Giannandrea regime, and Subramaniam will be able to take credit for it. But assuming Siri reaches the 2026 standard for voice assistants, how long until it will look good?
Apple’s release said Giannandrea’s retirement will be effective in the spring of next year.
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