Meet Apple's new SVP for ML and AI (video)

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.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djkeV4gew4Q&w=840&h=473]

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.

See also: Siri’s new boss: What the pundits are saying