The quiet Apple executive behind Apple’s AI strategy

Published

1 year ago

June 7, 2024

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Apple is behind on artificial intelligence.

Now, the company is getting ready to unleash its first wave of user-facing AI products. And behind that push is John Giannandrea, a Silicon Valley veteran who is Apple’s top executive in charge of AI strategy.

On Monday, Apple will hold its annual developers conference called WWDC, where it’s expected to show customers and investors its take on generative AI across products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac, the fruit of Giannandrea’s work.

There’s enormous pressure on Apple to deliver an impressive slate of AI products and services. In interviews with CNBC, several people who know and have worked with Giannandrea over the years depict him as a humble and ahead-of-the-curve technologist, a quality that could be essential to Apple catching up in AI.

Siri is a mess and struggles with even the most basic questions. Apple doesn’t sell a product like the AI chatbots being pushed out by Microsoft or startups OpenAI and Anthropic. It doesn’t sell powerful chips to cloud companies running AI services like Nvidia. Apple stock has lagged while shares of its peers have ballooned this year on the promise of AI. The stock is up just 1% this year, while Nvidia, which overtook Apple in market value on Wednesday, is up 144%. Apple also lost its spot as the most valuable public company in the world to another AI leader, Microsoft, in January.

Apple declined to comment.

Wall Street sees this as a moment for Apple to prove it’s not behind on AI, serving as a catalyst for the stock through the second half of the year and spurring a hot upgrade cycle for the next iPhone model.

“We believe that AI features, combined with other Apple ecosystem investments and hardware upgrades for iPhone 16, has the potential to drive upside to product estimates by increasing upgrade rates,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors this week.

Now it’s up to Giannandrea and his team to match those expectations.

As the tech world became increasingly obsessed with AI over the last 18 months or so, Apple began to talk more openly about how AI powers product features and development.

“We view AI and [machine learning] as fundamental, core technologies, and they are virtually embedded in every product that we build,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in August of 2023.

Until now, Giannandrea’s team has worked on AI features that run behind the scenes on Apple devices and software. That includes things like an accessibility feature that can digitally mimic someone’s voice if they lose the ability to speak themselves, or automatic edits that make your iPhone photos look better.

If you ask the folks at Apple, the company has been using AI for many years to power what you do on your Apple devices without you even knowing about it. That’s expected to evolve into more user-facing features this year, like improvements to the Siri digital assistant, a partnership with OpenAI that’ll add the ChatGPT-maker’s tech to the iPhone’s software and sophisticated voice controls for its apps, according to a Bloomberg report last week.

People who have worked with Giannandrea over the years who spoke to CNBC characterize him as a humble, mild-mannered technologist who doesn’t seek attention like more flashy Silicon Valley executives typically do.

His most notable start was at a company called General Magic, which spun out of Apple and began business in the early 1990s making software for PDAs, the predecessors to today’s modern smartphones. Late in that decade he cofounded TellMe, a startup that made a voice-activated, online information service.

A TellMe cofounder, Anthony Accardi, said Giannandrea always seemed ahead of his time, working on technology like running software in the cloud many years before it became the standard.

“He has the foresight to recognize this is an inevitability and direction we’re going in the future,” Accardi said.

Giannandrea, known by most as “JG,” joined Google after the search giant acquired another startup he cofounded called Metaweb.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the “godfathers” of AI, worked with Giannandrea at Google. Hinton said Giannandrea had a rare skillset among tech executives as both a great researcher and manager. Hinton pointed to a generative AI breakthrough Google made last decade: the ability to automatically caption images using AI.

“He really understood the importance of it,” Hinton said.

By 2018, Giannandrea oversaw AI at Google, and it was seen as a huge coup when Apple poached him that year. Within eight months, he was promoted to Apple’s leadership team, reporting directly to Cook along with other top executives like Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and services boss Eddy Cue. It was the biggest sign yet Apple was taking AI seriously, especially for future projects like its now-defunct self-driving car project.

So why leave Google, the perceived leader in AI at the time, for Apple? He didn’t like how leadership at Google had trouble making decisions and executing them, instead treating parts of the business like a skunkworks research lab, according to one person who spoke to Giannandrea recently. He found the opposite at Apple: leadership makes a decision, and then the rest of the company gets behind it to make it happen.

But in the six years since joining Apple, Giannandrea hasn’t been in the public view like his peers on Apple’s leadership team often are, showing off the company’s latest products and updates in flashy promotional videos littered with slick edits and dad jokes. Yet his many years of experience and expertise have earned him wide respect among other Silicon Valley leaders.

“I still go to him for wisdom,” said Emil Michael, a former top executive at Uber who also cofounded TellMe with Giannandrea.

Outside of Apple, Giannandrea sits on the board of SETI, the nonprofit organization founded in 1984 to detect radio signals from potential intelligent life across the cosmos. He also ran a data center business with his wife in recent years, which he eventually sold, adding to his list of successful exits at tech companies he cofounded.

At SETI, Giannadrea is an active and engaged board member, and even gave some of his own money to help fund a new project called COSMIC that uses powerful computers to analyze radio signals from outer space, SETI CEO Bill Diamond told CNBC. Giannandrea also sat on a SETI review committee to give feedback on research plans for planetary defenses against asteroids, according to Diamond.

“He’s got a very scientific mind, an engineering mind,” Diamond said. “The question about life beyond Earth fascinates him.”

Some who know Giannandrea told CNBC they’d be surprised if he made an appearance during Apple’s WWDC keynote next week, instead delegating the spotlight to members of his team or Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software.

“JG is not a showman,” one person who knows him well told CNBC. “That’s not his vibe.”

Technology

Musk threatens ‘immediate’ legal action against Apple over alleged antitrust violations

Published

9 hours ago

August 12, 2025

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Musk threatens 'immediate' legal action against Apple over alleged antitrust violations

Elon musk and the xAI logo.

Vincent Feuray | Afp | Getty Images

Elon Musk on Monday threatened Apple with legal action over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his artificial intelligence startup xAI.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk wrote in a post on social media platform X.

Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

“Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your “Must Have” section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?” Musk said in another post.

Apple last year tied up with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. Musk at that time had said that “If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation.”

CNBC confirmed that ChatGPT was ranked No. 1 in the top free apps section of the American iOS store, and was the only AI chatbot in Apple’s “Must-Have Apps” section.

Prior to his legal threats against Apple, Musk had celebrated Grok surpassing Google as the fifth top free app on the App Store.

OpenAI on Thursday announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale AI model, following xAI Grok 4 chatbot released last month.

This is not the first time Apple has been challenged on antitrust grounds. The Department of Justice last year sued Apple over iPhone ecosystem monopoly.

In June, a panel of judges denied Apple’s emergency application to halt the changes to its App Store. The iPhone maker had requested the appeals court to pause an order that said the company could no longer charge a commission on payment links inside its apps nor tell developers how the links should look.

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this story.

Technology

Trump flip-flops on Intel CEO, calls him ‘success’ days after demanding resignation

Published

14 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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Trump flip-flops on Intel CEO, calls him 'success' days after demanding resignation

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.

Ann Wang | Reuters

President Donald Trump said Monday that he and members of his cabinet met with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, days after he called on the head of the chipmaker to resign. Intel shares rose 2% in extended trading.

“I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

An Intel spokesperson confirmed the meeting.

“Earlier today, Mr. Tan had the honor of meeting with President Trump for a candid and constructive discussion on Intel’s commitment to strengthening U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Tan has been an Intel director since 2022, and in March he replaced Pat Gelsinger as CEO. Last week Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., questioned Tan’s ties to China. Cotton brought up a past criminal case involving Cadence Design, where Tan had been CEO, and asked whether Intel required Tan to divest from positions in chipmakers linked to the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army and any other concerning entities in China.

Trump’s latest message marks a stark change in tone from last week. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the president wrote that Tan “is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”

Intel said in a comment later that day that the company, directors and Tan are “deeply committed to advancing U.S. national and economic security interests.”

The Trump administration has taken a heavy hand in the business world, particularly in the semiconductor market, as the U.S. battles with China for supremacy in artificial intelligence. Over the weekend, Nvidia agreed to pay the federal government a 15% cut in return for receiving export control licenses that will allow it to once again sell its H20 chip to China and Chinese companies. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited Trump in the White House on Friday.

President Trump on Monday said that he initially asked Nvidia for a 20% cut of the chipmaker’s sales to China, but the number came down to 15% after Huang negotiated with him.

“I said, ‘listen, I want 20% if I’m going to approve this for you, for the country,'” Trump said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

Tan, 65, took over Intel after the struggling chipmaker had failed to gain significant traction in the AI market, which Nvidia dominates, while it was burning cash to build its foundry business for chip manufacturing.

Tan was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore before moving to the U.S. and receiving a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said in late July that his first few months as Intel’s CEO had not been easy, with layoffs and cuts to the foundry division.

Intel canceled plans for manufacturing sites in Germany and Poland and would slow down development in Ohio, he told employees.

“Turning the company around will take time and require patience,” Tan said on a conference call with analysts in July. “We have a lot to fix in order to move the company forward.”

Intel shares are up 3% this year as of Monday’s close. The S&P 500 is up 8.4%.

— CNBC’s Fred Imbert contributed to this report.

WATCH: President Trump demands Intel CEO resign

Technology

StubHub IPO is back on for September after ticketing company delayed plans on tariff concerns

Published

15 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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StubHub IPO is back on for September after ticketing company delayed plans on tariff concerns

StubHub updates S-1 filing effectively restarting IPO process

StubHub, the ticketing marketplace that spun out of eBay in 2020, has resumed its plans to go public and is now aiming to hold its IPO next month, CNBC has learned.

The company originally paused its IPO plans in April as the stock market was reeling from President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. The decision came after StubHub submitted its prospectus in March indicating it would list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “STUB.”

StubHub now expects to kick off its IPO roadshow after Labor Day, Sept. 1, and make its debut later in the month, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

StubHub also filed an updated IPO prospectus on Monday. It reported revenue growth in the first quarter of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Operating income came in at $26.8 million for the period, after the company lost $883,000 in the year-ago period, but its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.

The IPO market has come to life in recent months after an extended dry spell due to high inflation and rising interest rates. A flurry of startups have made their public debuts, including rocket maker Firefly Aerospace, design software company Figma, crypto firm Circle and AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave. Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange that counts Peter Thiel as an investor, also filed its IPO prospectus last month.

StubHub has been a longtime player in the ticketing industry since its launch in 2000. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.

The company had sought a $16.5 billion valuation before it began the IPO process, CNBC previously reported. StubHub didn’t provide an expected pricing range for its shares in the filing.

As it prepares to go public, StubHub is contending with hefty competition in the online ticketing market. In addition to Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, StubHub is up against secondary market companies, including Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and TicketNetwork

For the first quarter, StubHub reported gross merchandise sales of $2.08 billion, up 15% from a year prior. That was a slowdown from 47% expansion the previous quarter. StubHub said GMS, or the total value paid by buyers for tickets and fulfillment, builds in each quarter and that initial sales for major concert tours typically occur near the end of the year.

WATCH: Recent first-day pops are for pre-AI companies