Apple Shakes Up AI Unit

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Bloomberg Apr 28 20:13 · 9436 Views

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman explains why Apple is moving parts of its AI unit away from an executive it lured away from Google in 2018. Gurman joins Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Technology.”

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Transcript

  • 00:00 We've been writing over the weekend about one particular executive they lured away from Google in 2018, and now he's getting some things pulled away from
  • 00:08 him.
  • 00:08 That's right.
  • 00:09 So
  • 00:10 here's the story with Apple AI Siri launched in 2011, and by 20/15/2016, a little bit after that, they really fell behind.
  • 00:18 Google Assistant
  • 00:19 came online,
  • 00:21 you had a lot of competitors, including Alexa from Amazon.
  • 00:25 And it felt like Apple had squandered A3 four year lead.
  • 00:28 And at the time, Apple felt that
  • 00:30 part of that is because the AI work at Apple was scattered across the company,
  • 00:35 right?
  • 00:35 They worked in silos across different divisions, hardware, software, services.
  • 00:41 So they hired John G Andrea, who was running AI in search of Google at the time, in 2018.
  • 00:45 They believe putting everything in his group
  • 00:47 would skyrocket their approach to AI and make them a true player in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
  • 00:53 So far, it hasn't worked out.
  • 00:54 You saw how far they've fallen behind compared to ChatGPT,
  • 00:57 Google, Gemini Copilot.
  • 00:59 So now what they're trying is breaking it up, going back to their roots, going back to that Apple functional organization
  • 01:05 and taking pieces of the AI group and rescattering them around the company.
  • 01:09 And that started a few weeks ago with Siri.
  • 01:11 They moved Siri from their AI division to their software engineering division, which makes sense to some extent because Siri is, well, software.
  • 01:19 And now what they're doing is they're taking the robotics division, which was also in the AI organization, and moving that to hardware engineering.
  • 01:26 Robotics that is a hardware play at heart.
  • 01:29 And so it makes sense to put that in the hardware engineering division.
  • 01:31 So we'll see how that works out.
  • 01:33 But to me and to many people at Apple, it feels like they're preparing for a world without a true AI chief,
  • 01:39 a world where Apple's back to being completely functionally organized
  • 01:42 and mark, a world where they're about to report earnings this week.
  • 01:45 They're trying to tackle China supply chain, move it more to India.
  • 01:49 Just brace us for what we expect on Thursday.
  • 01:53 I think that Apple,
  • 01:54 this is going to be one of the more interesting Apple earnings results presentations in a while, Not because of the numbers that they're going to share, not because of the data they're going to give in the prepared remarks, but because they have a lot more questions they're going to have to answer than usual.
  • 02:09 Things when it comes to AI, of course, is going to be big on the minds of
  • 02:13 analysts on the call, but also tariffs, also dealing with the Trump administration,
  • 02:17 dealing with innovation questions.
  • 02:19 So
  • 02:20 that's going to be
  • 02:21 really important earnings call to listen to, not because of what they're going to come out and say, but because of what they're going to be asked and how they're going to respond.
  • 02:27 So I'm actually very much looking forward to that and everyone should stay tuned for our coverage there.