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.