Bloomberg reported on the 24th (local time) that Apple plans to separate its secretly pursued robotics project department from the organizational structure of its artificial intelligence (AI) head, John Giannandrea, and transfer it to the hardware institutional sector.
The robotics team will be assigned to Senior Vice President John Turnus, who is responsible for hardware engineering within the AI master system. This organizational change is interpreted as a measure to strengthen Apple’s AI competitiveness, being the second instance in the last month where a core project has detached from the AI master system. Previously, Apple excluded the voice assistant Siri institutional sector from the AI organization.
Giannandrea, who comes from Google, oversees Apple’s AI strategies and projects, and this change aims to allow his team to focus on developing core AI technologies. Accordingly, the Siri and robotics teams will be operated separately under different leadership.
Siri development is led by Mike Rockwell, who directed the development of the mixed reality (MR) headset Vision Pro, while the robotics team is led by Kevin Lynch. The robotics team is researching new hardware utilizing AI technology, which could play an important role in Apple’s next-generation product lineup.
Apple is reportedly planning to develop a tabletop robot in the form of an iPad equipped with an AI arm, as well as autonomous robots. Meanwhile, Giannandrea has lost trust due to repeated delays in Siri's functionality and the inadequate responses of 'Apple Intelligence', leading to analyses that this organizational change may signal a reduction in his role.