Apple Inc executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.
Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She will be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change has not been announced publicly.
The move helps bolster a team that is racing to make Apple a leader in AI — an area where it has fallen behind technology peers. The company has struggled to match the capabilities of OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google. And its Apple Intelligence platform has suffered from a slow and bumpy rollout.
Photo: AFP
The Siri digital assistant, groundbreaking when it was unveiled in 2011, has come to symbolize Apple’s shortcomings in AI. Upstarts like OpenAI have created their own, more versatile chatbots, and smartphone rival Samsung Electronics Co has been faster to weave artificial intelligence features into its software. Amazon.com Inc is also adapting its Alexa platform for the AI world.
Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She joins the new team from Apple’s hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset.
A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment on the move.
Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple’s biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software. Haley Allen is to replace Vorrath overseeing program management for visionOS, the headset’s operating system, according to the people.
Prior to joining Giannandrea’s organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group’s previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath — as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers.
The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February last year, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said.
It has been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence, according to the executive. Vorrath is poised to bring Apple’s product development culture to the AI work, the person said.
This year, the artificial intelligence group is focused on revamping the underlying infrastructure of Siri and improving the company’s in-house AI models, Giannandrea said in the memo.
The company debuted its Apple Intelligence platform in October, but the initial version only included basic features like text-message and notification summarization.
Apple has promised to overhaul Siri as part of the AI rollout, but that element is not ready yet. The company aims to release a new version of the digital assistant as part of iOS 18.4 in April, Bloomberg has reported. The new version is designed to better respond to queries by tapping into the customer’s data. It can also identify what is currently on a user’s screen and more precisely control applications through a system called App Intents.
The current version of Siri has drawn criticism for not understanding requests and failing to execute simple commands. And even when the promised features do launch, they would not match the capabilities unveiled by Samsung, which uses a mix of its own technology and the Google Gemini platform.
Apple is working on an even more advanced version of Siri that includes a more conversational interface — something more in line with ChatGPT and other AI offerings. It would not be ready until at least next year, though Apple might give a preview of the software this year, Bloomberg has reported.
AI SPLURGE: The four major US tech companies have lost more than US$950 billion in value since releasing earnings and outlooks, while equipment makers were gaining Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that would reach about US$650 billion this year — a flood of cash earmarked for new data centers and all the gear within them. The spending planned by Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nascent market for artificial intelligence (AI) tools, is a boom without a parallel this century. Each of the companies’ estimates for this year is expected either near or surpass their budgets for the past three years combined. They would set a high-watermark for capital spending
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
COLLABORATION: Taiwan and the US could jointly find solutions to weaknesses in supply chain resilience for critical materials, focusing on mining and initial refinement Taiwan is likely to purchase rare earths from the US in the future, and is also in talks with Australia and Canada to strengthen global rare earth supply chain security, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. Taiwan and the US last month concluded the sixth Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue, during which both sides signed a joint statement endorsing the principles of the Pax Silica Declaration, pledging to deepen cooperation in areas including critical minerals. At the time, Kung said the two sides would establish working groups to advance cooperation in areas including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, critical materials and
RSS