apple Falling behind in artificial intelligence.
Now, the company is preparing to launch its first wave of user-facing artificial intelligence products. Behind the push is John Giannandrea, a Silicon Valley veteran and Apple’s senior director of artificial intelligence strategy.
On Monday, Apple will hold its annual developer conference, known as WWDC, where it is expected to showcase to customers and investors its vision for generative artificial intelligence, the product of Giannandrea’s work, in products such as iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Apple is under intense pressure to offer an impressive array of artificial intelligence products and services. In interviews with CNBC, several people who have known and worked with Giannandrea for many years described him as a humble and cutting-edge technologist, qualities that are crucial to Apple’s pursuit of artificial intelligence.
Siri is confusing and has difficulty solving even the most basic questions. Apple doesn’t sell products like artificial intelligence chatbots, but they are introduced by other companies Microsoft Or startups OpenAI and Anthropic. It won’t sell powerful chips to cloud companies running artificial intelligence services, such as Nvidia. Apple stock has lagged this year on the promise of artificial intelligence, while its peers have surged. The stock is up just 1% this year, while Nvidia, which surpassed Apple in market capitalization on Wednesday, is up 144%. Apple also ceded its status as the world’s most valuable public company to another AI leader, Microsoft, in January.
Apple declined to comment.
Wall Street believes that this is the moment when Apple proves that it is not lagging behind in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become a catalyst for the stock in the second half of the year and stimulate a hot upgrade cycle for the next iPhone model.
“We believe AI capabilities, combined with other investments in Apple’s ecosystem and iPhone 16 hardware upgrades, have the potential to drive growth through higher upgrade rates,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors this week. Drive rising product expectations.
Now, Giannandrea and his team need to meet those expectations.
As the tech world has become increasingly obsessed with artificial intelligence over the past 18 months or so, Apple has begun talking more openly about how artificial intelligence drives product features and development.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in August 2023: “We view artificial intelligence and (machine learning) as fundamental, core technologies, and they are embedded in virtually every product we make.
Until now, Giannandrea’s team has been developing artificial intelligence capabilities that run in the background on Apple devices and software. These include features like Accessibility, which can digitally mimic someone’s voice if they lose the ability to speak, or automatically edit to make your iPhone photos look better.
If you ask Apple employees, they’ll tell you that the company has been using artificial intelligence to power what you do on your Apple devices for years, and you didn’t even know it. This year is expected to evolve into more user-facing features, such as improvements to the Siri digital assistant, a partnership with OpenAI to add the ChatGPT maker’s technology to the iPhone’s software, and sophisticated voice controls for its apps. Bloomberg reports last week.
People who have worked with Giannandrea over the years described him in interviews with CNBC as a humble, urbane technologist who doesn’t seek the attention of those flamboyant Silicon Valley executives.
His most notable start was at a company called General Magic, which was spun off from Apple and started in the early 1990s making software for PDAs, the precursors to today’s modern smartphones. At the end of that decade, he co-founded TellMe, a startup that offered voice-activated online information services.
TellMe co-founder Anthony Accardi said Giannandrea always seemed to be ahead of the times, working on research years before technologies such as running software in the cloud became standard.
“He had the foresight to recognize that this was the inevitability and direction of our future,” Arkady said.
Giannandrea (known to most as “JG”) joined Google after the search giant acquired another startup he co-founded called Metaweb.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence, worked with Giannandrea on Google. Hinton said Giannandrea has a rare skill set among technology executives, being both a good researcher and a good manager. Hinton pointed to a generative AI breakthrough Google has made over the past decade: the ability to use artificial intelligence to automatically add captions to images.
“He really understands the importance of it,” Hinton said.
In 2018, Giannandrea was responsible for artificial intelligence work at Google, and Apple poaching him that year was regarded as a huge success. Within eight months, he was promoted to Apple’s leadership team, reporting directly to Cook, along with other senior executives such as chief operating officer Jeff Williams and services chief Eddie Cue. It’s the biggest sign yet that Apple is serious about artificial intelligence, especially for future projects like its now-defunct self-driving car project.
So why did you leave Google, the leader in artificial intelligence at the time, and choose Apple? According to a person who spoke to Giannandrea recently, he doesn’t like that Google’s leadership has trouble making and executing decisions, and instead treats parts of the business like a skunk research lab. He found the opposite at Apple: leadership makes a decision and then the rest of the company supports it to make it happen.
But in the six years since joining Apple, Giannandrea hasn’t been in the public eye as often as his peers on Apple’s leadership team, instead showcasing the company’s latest products and products in flashy promotional videos filled with clever editing and dad jokes. renew. However, his years of experience and expertise have earned him widespread respect from other Silicon Valley leaders.
“I still look to him for wisdom,” said Emil Michael, a former executive at the company. Uber He also co-founded TellMe with Giannandrea.
Outside of Apple, Giannandrea serves on the board of directors of SETI, an organization founded in 1984 to detect radio signals of potentially intelligent life in the universe. In recent years, he also ran a data center business with his wife, which he eventually sold, adding to a long list of successful exits from the technology company he co-founded.
At SETI, Giannadrea is an active and involved board member, even donating some of her own money to help fund a program called Kosmic SETI CEO Bill Diamond told CNBC that the company uses powerful computers to analyze radio signals from outer space. Diamond said Giannandria also serves on the SETI review committee, which provides feedback on the asteroid planetary defense research program.
“He has a very scientific mind, an engineering mind,” Diamond said. “Questions about life beyond Earth fascinated him.”
Some people who know Giannandrea told CNBC they would be surprised if he showed up at Apple’s WWDC keynote next week instead of focusing the attention on his team members or Apple software chief Craig Federighi.
“JG is not a showman,” a person familiar with him told CNBC. “That’s not his temperament.”
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