The last of the three Siri co-founders, Tom Gruber, retired from Apple last Wednesday. The announcement comes after Apple’s hiring of one of the most esteemed AI experts in the industry, John Giannandrea, former AI head at Google, who was appointed as the chief of the machine learning and AI strategy.

It is notable that the other two co-founders of Siri, Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus, left Apple back in 2011 and 2012 respectively, only sometime after the acquisition of Siri Inc by Apple. They have since established another startup called VivLabs, which was bought by Samsung in 2016.

The news was first revealed by a publication in The Information, which was also confirmed by the company’s spokesperson, who refrained from adding any further comments.

An unknown source revealed to the publication that Gruber’s retirement was not in any way related to any disharmony in the company. Instead, the 59-year-old veteran is leaving the company to pursue his personal interests in ocean conservations and photography. In his tenure of 8 years, Gruber remained as the head of ‘Siri’s Advanced Development Group’ at Apple.

Interestingly, another important member of the staff, Vipul Ved Prakash, also left Apple on the same day. Prakash was the head of Search at Apple.

As the chief of Google’s department that led to the birth of Google assistant, is now the sole head for the progress of Siri, it would be interesting to see how the AI assistant will grow in the near future. Until now, the pioneering service was lagging behind its younger rivals like Alexa and Google assistant, owing to the issues such as the lack of Natural language processing capabilities and data privacy, which kept it from providing more personalised offerings.

Resources:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/siris-last-remaining-cofounder-is-out-at-apple