John Giannandrea, Google’s former head of search and artificial intelligence, will now be an ‘Apple Man.’ The hire was announced a day after the senior executive announced his stepping down. There were also talks about a broader executive reshuffle, which in the present Apple movement, clears the surprise, that otherwise, left most in shock.
Giannandrea, a machine learning expert who joined Google in 2010, is a huge pick for Apple, which has struggled for years to make progress in fast-moving and increasingly important AI fields like computer vision and natural language processing. he will report directly to CEO Tim Cook as the leader of machine learning and AI strategy.
Both Facebook and Google are powerhouses in AI, who employ hundreds of researchers to work on different domains that routinely publish substantive papers. These are a huge collection that he;ps the community at large. Apple, though it helped define the early market for voice-based digital assistants with Siri, has had neither the access to data nor the research talent and resources to approach AI development with the same level of intensity as its rivals.
Siri remains the butt of innumerable jokes about AI’s lacking sophistication. The general conception of the Siri platform is that it remains behind the quality level of Google Assistant, which uses some of the same game-changing algorithms that power Google Translate and Google Image Search, and also lags behind Amazon’s Alexa, the smart home industry leader.
With Giannandrea joining the fold, however, Apple may be able to recruit more top-level talent and improve its algorithms, a feat the company has long said it wants to achieve. Yet because neural networks — the backbone of deep learning techniques for developing self-improving software — require large amounts of data to be trained on, Apple is necessarily at a disadvantage because it only has access to publicly available sets. Facebook and Google, on the other hand, operate large-scale data collection operations with billions of users around the globe.
For Google, the loss of Giannandrea is not likely to have a big impact on its AI efforts. Taking Giannandrea’s place is Google veteran Jeff Dean, widely considered to be one of the most talented and trusted figures in AI research. Dean co-founded Google Brain, the research unit behind some of the field’s most significant advances of the last 10 years. He’s now in charge of Google’s entire AI unit, which has been separated out from the search team, with a focus both on how AI will be implemented into products and long-term research.