John Giannandrea

Apple has been behind the curve on artificial intelligence, but John Giannandrea, the company’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, aims to push the company up to full speed.

Until 2016, Apple did not allow employees to publish public-facing research on AI, viewing such efforts as the company’s intellectual property. Giannandrea came from Google to Apple in 2018 and works with the executive team on artificial intelligence projects across the company. 

This summer, Apple announced two groundbreaking advancements in AI-driven consumer applications. The company will use its own models for everything from photo editing and email management to web searches, which it dubs "Apple Intelligence." It also revealed a strategic partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT with Siri, enhancing its virtual assistant's capabilities. These AI features promise to understand deep personal context while also protecting user privacy. Apple Intelligence will be free to Apple users—at least at first.

Giannandrea has said that the company is focused on a more limited scope of AI than other tech titans, aiming instead to help a large swathe of the population apply AI in practical ways to their daily lives.

*Disclosure: OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME's archives.