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?”

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.

Nah, ksec had a great post in a thread a few months ago about a number of senior execs Tim Cook has promoted to positions to which they're ill-suited. John Giannandrea was just one of many such people:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436174

An organization of Apple's size doesn't fail due to the mistakes of a single person, unless that person is the CEO.

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.

He did nothing, or net-negative. Same as Google; it was totally unclear how this guy got promoted to the level of power he had based on his history.

[Now I remember- he came in with the metaweb acquisition at a time when search was going all-in on knowledge graphs and semantics]

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

interesting