Amar Subramanya is an Indian-origin artificial intelligence researcher and engineering leader who has just been appointed Apple’s new vice president of AI, succeeding long-time executive John Giannandrea. He is widely recognized for turning cutting-edge machine learning research into large-scale consumer products across Google, Microsoft, and now Apple.
Current role at Apple
- Apple has named Amar Subramanya its VP of AI, where he will report to software chief Craig Federighi.
- His remit includes leading Apple Foundation Models, core machine learning research, and AI safety and evaluation as the company expands Apple Intelligence across its devices and services.
Previous positions
- Before joining Apple, Subramanya was Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft, working on foundation models and AI systems underpinning products like Microsoft Copilot.
- He previously spent about 16 years at Google, rising from staff research scientist to head of engineering for the Gemini assistant and related large-scale AI platforms, and also collaborating with DeepMind.
Education and research background
- Subramanya completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical, Electronics and Communication Engineering from Bangalore University in India.
- He then earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, focusing on machine learning, semi-supervised learning, speech recognition, and human activity recognition, including work at Microsoft Research on robust speech and speaker verification.
Areas of expertise
- His core expertise covers large-scale machine learning systems, natural language processing, speech technologies, and foundation models deployed in real-world consumer and enterprise products.
- Industry coverage and Apple itself describe him as a “renowned AI researcher” who excels at bridging advanced research with practical product engineering at global scale.
