21 minutes with John Giannandrea, who was promoted to Apple’s innermost circle on Thursday.
Excerpts transcribed from Giannandrea’s appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017, six months before Apple poached him from Google.
- Computers are incredibly powerful, but they’re also pretty dumb.
- I’m a big fan of some of the ideas of Doug Engelbart, which led to a lot of the modern computing systems that we have today. And the basic idea is that the technology should augment the human intellect, not replace it.
- There’s just a huge amount of unwarranted hype around AI right now. There’s a bunch of people who are unreasonably concerned about the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence, as some people call it. I just see no evidence that we’re on the cusp of this. I think machine learning and artificial intelligence is extremely important and will revolutionize many industries. And I’m very excited about the progress we’re making. But it’s very practical and applied progress. I think that what we’re doing is building tools like, say, the Google search engine, that make YOU more productive.
Cue the video, which I posted eight months ago.
My take: I like this guy. We didn’t see much of him during his eight years at Google, and we’ve seen even less since he joined Apple last April.
1. Apple Music
2. iCloud
3. New search engine (looking at you, John Giannandrea) w/total privacy
4. VPN service
5. Streaming video
Until then, we’ll have to live with FUDsters and “analysts” channel-checking, bending and blending, and general hyperventilating over iPhones, iPads, Macs and Watches.
I’m 72, Apple Music just isn’t geared for my generation. At my sister’s yesterday listening to her Pandora sub. Much better.
I’d love to see an early update to Apple’s repurchase program.
Today’s price of AAPL is ridiculous. Where are the buyers?