John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

I just want whoever is next in line to make Siri perform reliably and consistently. Not 70% of the time of even 90% of the time, 100% of the time for the limited uses cases that most (perhaps just me?) people use it for:

- Call "person"

- Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work)

- Find "place" (while driving) - Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I found this on the web)

- Set a timer or alarm

- Check the messages (in a sane way)

- Set reminders (this one surprisingly works well)

- Use intents correctly (I just want to be able to say "play 99% invisible in Overcast")

It doesn't need to do all the fancy things they show-cased last year. It just needs to do the basics really well and build from there.

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.

A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.

If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.

I know one feature Siri has added in the past fifteen years, because I always complained that Siri couldn't "text this photo to my wife." I would demonstrate to people that this doesn't work, complain about the lack of discoverability, and mention how with each new release of iOS I would try it again to confirm it still didn't work.

Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an example of a product I liked or didn't like) I went into this spiel, and what do you know, Siri texted the photo to my wife. :-)

So somewhere along the way they did add that feature, and apparently I didn't realize I had missed checking for it.

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote:

When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am..

And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream.

Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.

People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

If this video is to believed, this is the result of internal Apple politics between the software engineering folks, and the AI folks, with the software engineering folks "winning"

https://youtu.be/50XKNKGPWs8?si=nznI4ydFBT5pXfNa

Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.

brief career timeline:

1980s - silicon graphics / general magic

1990s - chief technologist, netscape

early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)

late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google

2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)

2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof

2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push

March 2025 - removed as head of Siri

Dec 2025 - retirement

would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!

-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20

cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.

“Hey Siri, call Kate”… “Calling Derek” (who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years).

I remember when I was a kid having an old iPod touch that didn’t support Siri and having to jailbreak it, find some weird poorly documented package in Cydia, and download that suspect package on my device while entering some (in hindsight) equally suspect servers into some really hard to find text field in settings that somehow™ enabled that old iPod touch use Siri.

All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.

I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”

Underlying this seems to be a hard engineering problem: how to run a SaaS within UI timeframes that can store or ferry enough context to tailor for individual users, with privacy.

While Eddie Cue seems to be Apple's SaaS man, I can't say I'm confident that separating AI development and implementation is a good idea, or that Apple's implementation will not fall outside UI timeframes, given their other availability issues.

Unstated really is how good local models will be as an alternative to SaaS. That's been the gambit, and perhaps the prospective hardware-engineering CEO signals some breakthrough in the pipeline.

I think the main issue I have with Apple Intelligence via Siri is that it’s not very predictable anymore which things it can handle. Sometimes it will answer nuanced questions helpfully, and other times I’ll ask for it to play the only podcast in my lineup and it’ll instead play some random song I’ve never heard of. I find it more useful when I’m thinking and running and want an answer to a question, because I know I can get the answer whenever I stop long enough to pull my phone out, but in the meantime having the answer would help me work through something. I’d say my overall impression of the capabilities are negative, and it’s also not a surprise (it’s not like Apple pretended it can do things it can’t, which should have been their clue early on I guess)

I tried Siri once when it first came out to play a song while I was driving and instead it started calling my ex-girlfriend. After that I swore it off for good.

Wow, come to think of it, Siri failed; ChatGPT completely eclipsed the tool.

Kinda wish they’d bring back the “where should I hide a body?” Easter egg. Even if it wasn’t very capable, Siri could make me laugh.

I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.

Meanwhile android demanding I use Gemini and then telling me my Google account has no Gmail to turn on Gemini to add a calender entry

And then my exchange business plan telling me copilot is here over and over in a giant popup screen and then saying - it's not available yet

I can't believe Apple still hasn't rolled back or majorly revamped AI notification summaries. It's been over a year since launch, and their primary use case is pretty much just sharing screenshots when it does something hilarious/inappropriate.

This is a serious question that's partially mine, but I'm asking because of all the comments here: Specifically, what HAS Apple done with Siri over 15 years?

Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it just never launch? Am I simply ignorant?

Siri is great for setting timers as long as they aren’t for 15 or 50 minutes.

Haven’t found anything else it’s useful for.

When is Tim Apple retiring? Put an engineer in charge so they can fix Apple's rotting software.

Even if you have all the money in the world, it's still crucial to put the right people in the right places.

Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.

The only usage of Siri to me is to set hot spot so that it doesn’t shut down itself in a few mins. (And BTW why the f does it do that?) But it has failed to switch on Hotspot recently so I don’t use it anymore.

If it's not a new color, or a new switch between stainless, aluminum, or titanium, Apple seems unable to manage their tech stack.

So what is going on here? The reason is definitely not that Apple couldn't even train a small local LLM to power Siri, right?

This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like.

I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.

I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).

At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?

Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon) both has massive wiffs on AI

Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever.

We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.

In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.

Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.

People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.

IMO the problem is he was going for "real AI" instead of "fake it until you make it" AI.

Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."

i wonder if this is related to the new appletv and speakers being apparently delayed

No one dares to question Apple’s culture. Perhaps something is rotten inside. The same people who milked iPhone for 14 years. But they got Vision Pro a full year after Meta proved that’s a dead end. What a joke of corporate leadership.

Who? Maybe that was the problem.

What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?

Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.

If they let you use siri to change settings it would be very useful. Instead I have to search fro hard to find options.

Why does the title of this post keep changing? I think this is at least the third iteration of it now. I don't understand the HN obsession with titles. Now half the comments don't even make sense or people wonder why they keep talking about Siri.

interesting

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114144