The Siri Shuffle
Mark Gurman
The proverbial other shoe has dropped, it seems:
Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation.
Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.
Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple announced the changes to employees on Thursday following Bloomberg News’ initial report.
John Gruber and I recorded an episode of The Talk Show podcast yesterday and this obviously was discussed at length (here are his brief thoughts before we recorded). But it's also three hours long, so just to jot down some quick thoughts on this matter here before it drops...
First and foremost, while I made the quick, cheap, and obvious joke yesterday that Apple was putting the person in charge of the Vision Pro in charge of Siri, this does actually seem like good news for all involved – including us, the end users. While these two projects are linked as two largely unsuccessful ones for Apple, they're really almost the opposite of one another. Vision Pro isn't a huge hit for Apple because the strategy around the device was a mess. But the product itself does everything it aims to do and does it increasingly well. Siri, meanwhile, has a strategy that makes sense, especially in our age of AI. But the product is a complete and utter mess. And has been for 14 years running.
So putting the person who led the impossible task of shipping the technical marvel that is the Vision Pro on time into the market (even though it was the wrong strategic call to do so) in charge of the impossible task of fixing the disastrous Siri situation actually makes quite a bit of sense on paper. And bringing his lieutenants, including Kim Vorrath (and now another senior leader, Aimee Nugent, it sounds like) who partnered with Rockwell to get the Vision Pro in shipping shape, gives one even more hope.
The bigger question to me is timing. As Gruber and I discussed, after the MobileMe fiasco, it took about three years for Apple to go back, heads down, to come up with iCloud. I don't think it will take Apple that long here – nor can it, given how fast the AI landscape is shifting – but I still think the right thing to do may be to "shut down" Siri for a time (not the entire product, keep the core functionality, but outsource the "world model" stuff to their partnership with ChatGPT) and let the team work to build it anew, behind-the-scenes. This is seemingly the playbook Amazon ran to get Alexa+ out the door – and likely why "she" was delayed by over a year.1
But Amazon also has the benefit of a massive investment and tight partnership with Anthropic. Apple doesn't have that level of relationship with OpenAI – though they almost did – and so it's not clear there's the level of trust there required to pull this all off. That's why, ultimately, I still think Apple needs to make an acquisition in the space. Maybe a few of them. But this may be a time for Apple to do what it rarely does: make a big splash. Again, Gruber and I go into this in more detail, but I think Apple has some compelling options here.
As for John Giannandrea – "JG" as he's known – it's a bit weird of a dynamic given that he has the SVP title, but is seemingly losing purview of this key project to Rockwell – who will report to JG's peer, Craig Federighi. But all sides seem to be playing nice about this shift at the moment and they may be able to make it work:
Giannandrea has a different background. A former Google star, he was hired in 2018 to run Apple’s AI work. Giannandrea had been one of Alphabet Inc.’s most senior executives, overseeing the search and AI divisions. Rockwell, in contrast, doesn’t have prior experience as an AI leader or clout within the burgeoning machine-learning community.
Rockwell doesn't have the clout needed to recruit (and retain) the top AI talent that Apple will need here, but JG still does. The mistake seemed to be putting him in charge of the entire org, including the AI user-facing products, when he should have probably been more behind-the-scenes, managing the more technical aspects. He'll apparently now be able to do that.
This also gives me more hope:
Inside Apple, Rockwell hasn’t been shy about criticizing Siri, according to people familiar with the matter. For years, he has pitched senior vice presidents on ideas for overhauling the voice assistant to make it more personalized. He has also been advising the AI group in recent weeks. Even before the management changes, Giannandrea long considered Rockwell a potential successor.
People within Apple are not stupid (obviously), they see all the same Siri ridiculousness that we do. They seemingly just got trapped in some sort of infinite loop – for years – unable to take the steps necessary to fix it. It sounds like Rockwell will. Then it just comes down to execution. In the fastest-moving and hottest industry perhaps ever.
Good luck!
1 I'm still quite skeptical of how well Alexa+ will actually work in the wild, but we should see soon -- they said she would start rolling out this month and we're in the final stretch!