Amar Subramanya: Bengaluru boy chosen to reboot Apple’s AI strategy

Bengaluru-born engineer Amar Subramanya, a Google and Microsoft veteran, has been appointed Apple's new VP of AI. This high-profile move signals Apple's intensified efforts in the AI race. Subramanya, with expertise in semi-supervised learning and NLP, will lead foundation models, machine learning research, and AI safety, aiming to revitalize Siri and boost Apple's AI capabilities against rivals.
BENGALURU: Apple has appointed Amar Subramanya — a Bengaluru-educated engineer and veteran of Google and Microsoft — as its new vice-president of artificial intelligence, marking one of the most high-profile talent moves in Silicon Valley’s intensifying AI race.Bengaluru beginnings and US academic rise Born and educated in Bengaluru, Subramanya completed his BE in electrical, electronics and communications engineering from Bangalore University in 2001 before moving to the United States for higher studies. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2009, specialising in semi-supervised learning and graphical models — techniques that have become increasingly valuable for companies like Apple that limit access to large user-data pools. During his graduate years, he worked on speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and human-activity analysis, and received a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship in 2007. He later co-authored Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning, now a widely cited text in machine-learning curricula.A long stint at Google Subramanya joined Google in 2009, spending 16 years in roles that bridged research and engineering. By 2023, he was leading engineering for Gemini, Google’s flagship multimodal AI model, which scales up to 1.2 trillion parameters. His work focused on large-scale NLP, multimodal systems and speech technologies — areas central to the current wave of foundation models.A brief but notable move to Microsoft In July 2025, he left Google for Microsoft as corporate vice-president of AI, part of a wider wave of talent movement after Microsoft hired over 20 researchers from Google’s DeepMind unit. His LinkedIn post announcing the move — praising Microsoft’s “refreshingly low-ego yet bursting with ambition” culture — was widely read as a subtle critique of Google’s internal environment. At Microsoft, he contributed to the foundation-model architecture driving Copilot, the assistant integrated across Windows, Office and Azure.Now at Apple: A mandate to fix Siri and accelerate AI Subramanya replaces John Giannandrea, who is retiring after steering Apple’s machine-learning and AI strategy for several years. He will now oversee Apple’s foundation models, machine-learning research and AI safety teams. His remit includes advancing Apple’s reportedly 1-trillion-parameter in-house model and guiding the company’s planned $1bn licensing deal with Google’s Gemini — a partnership layered with competitive irony. Apple hopes his expertise will help revive Siri, long criticised as lagging behind rivals, and close the gap with companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic.
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