Last month Apple replaced John Giannandrea with Mike Rockwell, who spearheaded the development of the Vision Pro, as lead of the Apple Intelligence/Siri team. Now, Rockwell has replaced the team with folks from his Vision Pro team, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. Specifically, he says that:
° Ranjit Desai, an “Engineering, Technology and Product Development Leader at Apple,” is being placed in charge of the underlying Siri system group.
° Olivier Gutknecht — senior director of the Vision Products Group — is taking over the user experience team.
° Nate Begeman, a Distinguished Engineer at Apple, and Software Engineer Tom Duff will work on underlying architecture.
° Former Tesla executive Stuart Bowers, is moving from Apple Vision Pro data, training and evaluation teams, to working on Siri’s user responses.
° David Winarsky, director of Response Engineering, will take over a new team concentrating on speech.
Gurman has said that Apple CEO Tim Cook has “lost confidence” ion Giannandrea’s ability to “execute on product development.” Giannandrea will now oversee artificial intelligence research and development in general.
With Rockwell leaving the Technology Development Group, the Vision Pro will now be under the stewardship of Paul Meade, who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell. Meade has led hardware development for the spatial computer. He’s one of software chief Craig Federighi’s lieutenants, overseeing the underlying architecture of the company’s operating systems.
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