John Giannandrea out as Siri chief, Apple Vision Pro lead in
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.
John Giannandrea
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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Most likely he will be given some bland placeholder title like VP, Special Projects until a more suitable position can be found for him. I dunno, maybe he can work on the Mac Pro since no one else seems to be working on it.
U need a 10x investment atleast
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.
"One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional."
The last year? How about the last decade. About the only thing Siri has consistently been good at is setting a timer. Most of the time I use Alexa for that, but it frequently forgets before time is up.
Is AI supposed to save Siri? I've no interest in AI and probably won't for the next 1-2 years, until it can do something I'm interested in, and do it accurately and reliably.
Your comment brings up an important illustrative point. No one has the time to dork around with 7-8 AI chatbots to find one (or more) that gives the correct answer for each question. That's not a sustainable approach.
There's probably some AI chatbot that will might get the right answer to a simple question. The problem is no AI chatbot is reliably accurate enough to instill trust and confidence. I can't ask ten questions to 8 chatbots and wade through the responses. In the same way, having ten human personal assistants isn't a worthwhile approach.
Let's say Grok has a 20% accuracy score and Gemini is 40%. That's double the accuracy for Gemini but it still is way too low to be trusted and deemed reliable.
Like I said I think Apple's senior management is understanding this which is why they've postponed the AI-enabled Siri. Even if it were 60-80% accurate, that's still too low to be useful. You really don't want a personal assistant -- human or AI -- that makes so many messes that you have to go clean up after them or find an alternate personal assistant to might do some of those failed tasks better. In the end for many tasks right now, you are better off using your own brain (and maybe a search engine) to figure many things out because AI chatbots will unapologetically make stuff up.
All of these AI assistants will flub some questions. The problem is you don't know which one will fail which question at any given moment. That's a waste of time. I think the technology will eventually get there but I'm much more pessimistic about the timeline today compared to a year ago because improvements in these LLMs seems to have stalled or even regressed. I don't know why that is but it doesn't matter to Joe Consumer. It just needs to work. Basically all the time. And right now none of them do.
For sure I am not the first person to ask an AI assistant about the Super Bowl and March Madness. And yet these AI ASSistants have zero motivation to improve accuracy even if they are caught fibbing or screw up an answer.
I've used all of the major AI assistants and they all routinely muck up. The fact that I did not try Gemini is simply because I got far enough by the third AI chatbot to deem this a waste of time. I can't keep jumping from one AI chatbot to another until I find one that gives an acceptable result.
In most cases, the AI assistant doesn't know it is wrong. You have to tell the developer (there's often a thumbs up or thumbs down for the answer). And that doesn't make the AI assistant get it right for the next person who asks the same question. Maybe enough people asked Gemini the question and the programmers fixed Gemini to give the proper response. One thing for sure, AI assistants don't have any common senses whatsoever. Hell, a lot of humans don't either so if LLMs are modeled after humans, it's no wonder that AI assistants are so feeble.
Here in March 2025 all consumer-facing AI assistants are silly toys that wastefully use up way too much electricity and water. I still use some AI-assisted photo editing tools because my Photoshop skills are abysmal. But for a lot of other things, I'll wait for AI assistants to mature. A lot more mature.
Having Craig Federighi on is a big "we will ship" sign. It should have happened earlier but now the decision has been made and the team is ON.
Couldn't be happier.
Apple has an additional hurdle: one of their key pillars to the way they operate is their defense of customer privacy. Some of their competition really does not value privacy. In fact, some of them (Meta, Alphabet) make most of their revenue selling users' online activity data.
In the end I would rather wait for a private and reliable AI assistant rather than muck around with alpha-quality AI assistant shovelware that is doing God knows what with my activity. At least with Meta and Alphabet, I know they are selling it.
Unfortunately Apple took its sweet time to make this change, just like letting Project Titan fester for years.
Let's also remember that consumer-facing AI is new technology still in its infancy. It's not like there's any (consumer) company that has been doing this for 20+ years. Apple only started including machine learning silicon in their chips in 2017.
Everyone is pretty new to AI which is why not a single consumer-facing AI assistant is head-and-shoulders better than the competition. It's all alpha quality right now. And it doesn't look like whoever has the most datacenter Nvidia GPUs wins either.
Like most Americans with a retirement plan, I am an indirect investor in almost all of the major players. I have a vested interest in seeing some level of success from all of them. Competition is good, it drives quality, innovation and value. I also appreciate Apple's commitment to privacy. This reason itself makes me want Apple to be a top competitor in this field.
it is no surprise a supply chain guru sucks at software strategy.
It's important to point out that Services revenue has grown massively under the current leadership.
I think Cook is smart enough to know that when brainstorming future software roadmaps, there might be someone else in the room who should be holding the whiteboard marker for the majority of time.
Tim isn't writing code for Apple, he relies on his direct reports to say "Yes, we can make ____ happen by ____." This is not unique, this happens in all sorts of businesses all around the world every single minute. Somewhere on this planet, there is a restaurant kitchen getting slammed. Some line cook is telling their chef "I got this" or "I could use a hand here".
Clearly some deadlines were missed concerning AI-powered Siri hence the change. However it's also important to point out that Siri is not a P&L center unlike Apple TV+ or iCloud or Fitness+ or the Apple Watch hardware division.
A person can make all the snarky armchair CEO comments they want. But doing so risks unveiling how much that person knows about working in a business, whether it be some mom-and-pop shop, a Fortune 10 megacorp or somewhere in between.