Apple Breaks Up with AI

Analyst Mark Gurman reported today that Apple is breaking up its AI team and reverting to a more traditional internal structure, at least for Apple. That is, instead of having a single, centralized AI team, as other companies might, Apple is instead spreading out the team members to different parts of the company, and along functional lines.

This, Gurman says, is how Apple normally does things, and it’s how Apple’s various AI efforts were organized before it hired John Giannandrea away from Google in 2018. Giannandrea is perhaps best known for his work on Apple’s secretive self-driving vehicle project, but his failure to deliver conversational Siri in the past year led to a series of professional setbacks in which he lost control of Siri and, more recently, another secretive robotics project.

Today, Mike Rockwell leads the conversational Siri efforts under Apple software lead Craig Federighi. And his former group, Vision Pro, has been split in half, Gurman says, with Rockwell retaining control of its software while a separate hardware group is now pushing to adapt the technology to smart glasses.

Gurman says that Apple’s AI reorganization has resulted in two major changes. Giannandrea and his team can now focus on the foundational AI models that will power Apple Intelligence across the stack. And Apple can more broadly improve its software across products lines as it has in the past. This seems illogical in some ways, but Apple doesn’t have dedicated iPhone, iPad, and Mac teams but instead has different hardware, software, and services organizations. So the AI functionality that Apple provides will now come out of groups that develop software related to its operating systems, apps, and services.

The robotics and smart glasses efforts are particularly important to Apple because they point to potential future growth. Apple sees robotics as important to its consumer customers, and it’s been working on a tabletop robot as a sort of future smart display, with mobile and humanoid robots further out on the roadmap. And with Meta making advances in smart glasses, Apple CEO Tim Cook has charged underlings with creating a response based on Apple Intelligence. This feels like a fairly obvious push, though Apple’s smart glasses will require an iPhone, much like Apple Watch, and not be a standalone device. (Future Vision Pro versions will include one that tethers to a Mac for similar reasons, Gurman says.)

Apple reports its next quarterly earnings on Thursday, May 1.