alt Hacker Newsbrief 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.
Replies
This is good context to add to the article, because he's basically at retirement age anyways. Depends a little on whether 1980s means "1980" or "1989" but with that resume I think he can afford retirement even if it's 1989 :)
This is quite a spectacular CV.
Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.
This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".
I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.