Amar Subramanya will likely become one of the most closely watched hires Apple has made in years. Here’s what he needs to do first.
Apple’s new VP of AI has some experience with catching up
Following the retirement announcement of John Giannandrea, Apple confirmed that Amar Subramanya will join the company after less than six months as Corporate Vice President of AI at the newly formed Microsoft AI division.
Before that, though, he spent 16 years at Google, where he joined as a Staff Research Scientist and became a Principal Engineer before being appointed Vice President of Engineering in 2019.
He was also credited in two recent papers of very high-profile releases: Gemini in December 2023, and Imagen 3 in August 2024.
Interestingly, Google spent a good portion of the last few years in a similar predicament as Apple.
Like the rest of the market, Google missed the starting gun with the release of ChatGPT, and scrambled before finding its footing, which was particularly awkward for them, since Google invented the Transformer architecture (the T in GPT).
But as anyone who follows the AI field closely will tell you, Google is undeniably back, and it is giving OpenAI a run for its money. Literally.
Following the release of the most recent Gemini model, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman told his team to expect some “rough vibes” and “temporary economic headwinds,” which translates to: “they caught up with us, this is not going away, and investors know it, too.”
Google’s path to not-AGI-but-prett-mych-the-same-intelligence-as-OpenAI was not without its… detours. Remember when Bard was the company’s bet on the future of AI? Good times.
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