Matthew Panzarino, at Tech Crunch -

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea.

Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme.

The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple’s internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they’re wedded to various projects, including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more. ML is everywhere, basically.

I’m very excited for what this can mean for Siri and AI/ML at Apple. Although Apple is pretty far behind in this realm, the article brings up a good point about how Apple has by far the largest edge compute network in the world. Edge computing is a term associated with cloud computing, that refers to computing happening on users devices instead of in a datacenter somewhere. Both datacenter cloud computing and edge computing have their own unique advantages. It will be interesting to see where this all goes.

Siri is clearly way behind Google Assistant, or Amazon Echo in terms of functionality, however it has advantages in how it’s so tightly integrated in to the Apple ecosystem, that if John and his new team can iron out some of the basic functionality, I think Siri becomes a serious player again.