Apple has decided to replace the head of Siri and its strategy in AI after several months with delays and problems with Apple Intelligence.
Mike Rockwell, until now head of the Vision Pro project, is the one who takes control of Siri to replace John Giannandreaas reported Bloomberg.
Why is it important. This change reflects the concern to increase Apple for its position in the AI race. Tim Cook would have “lost confidence” in Giannandrea after numerous delays in the development of promised functions during WWDC 2024, as Mark Gurman explained.
Between bambalins. In a recent internal meeting, Giannandrea admitted to his team that the delays were “ugly” and recognized the shame and anger that this had generated among the staff. The uncertainty about the launch dates caused internal tensions that climbed up to Apple’s address.
Apple He was strong for Apple Intelligence in his event for developers Nine months ago, but the implementation has been extremely slow. Just a few weeks ago they had to announce that The personalized functions of Siri postponed up to 2026one of the key pieces of your strategy.
The context. AI is the new battlefield for great technological ones. While rivals like Microsoft, Google and OpenAi have taken giant steps with their assistants and generative models, Apple has lagged behind with a Siri that has barely evolved in years.
A risky bet. Rockwell lacks specific experience in AI, but Apple, as published by Bloomberghas valued its ability to solve complex problems and bring new products to the market.
As responsible for Vision Promanaged teams of thousands of people and managed to launch a revolutionary product to the market, despite the many obstacles that were on the road.
- It is inevitable to ask if the person responsible for a very complex product, but with discreet commercial impact in its first year in the market, is the ideal person to relaunch the strategy of a service that will reach hundreds of millions of devices and for which you have to work counterreloj.
And now what? Rockwell will report to Craig Federight Aka ‘Pelazo’, Apple software head, while Paul Meade, who worked in hardware engineering for Vision Pro, will assume the direction of that department.
Giannandrea will maintain other responsibilities in research of AI and robotics technologies, but without the focus on the day -to -day life of Apple Intelligence.
In perspective. This movement underlines the difficulty that Apple is having to compete in AI without compromising its approach to privacy. Apple needs to balance innovation with its traditional perfectionism, something that is being especially complex in the field of generative AI. In fact, what was seen so far in Apple Intelligence (disastrous notificationsslow and mediocre results in image playground) It is from that perfectionism.
Time will say if Rockwell’s experience in bringing complex products to the market will be enough to revitalize Siri and make Apple Intelligence become a competitive alternative to rivals such as ChatgPT or Google Gemini. But that is Apple’s new hope. It is that, or languish.
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