“Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be, One Siri Executive Less on The Lavatory” - Or “Apple Loses More Top AI Talent”

“Boom Boom Boom.. another one bites the dust!”

Or riffing off an old ditty you’d have be a certain age to understand:

Verse 1:

“Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Another Siri exec’s gone suddenly.
Turns out the exit strategy
Was building Apple’s AI… externally.”

Verse 2:

“He said he’d just pop to the lavatory,
Left behind a roadmap and strategy,
Came back? No he’s joined Gemini,
Building the brain Apple’s renting, you see.”

Meantime, Apple just delivered another “best quarter in our history,”

And lost another key Siri chief. The fourth in a month. Didn’t hear Cook mention that did you.

Apple’s “Mammoth Quarters” and “AI losses” are now less a brag and more a nervous tick. Revenue records, EPS records, iPhone 17 records, Greater China records – if you didn’t know better, you’d think Tim Cook had personally invented the future sometime between the opening bell and the earnings call.

Instead, last night he spent an hour doing what he does best: reading out ever-larger numbers from a script Steve Jobs wrote a decade and a half ago, then deftly refusing to answer any question that wanders within a hundred miles of risk.

Now let’s look at headcount. AI headcount, more specifically

Off paper, the same week this record quarter hit the tape, Apple quietly lost yet another senior Siri executive and another handful of AI researchers – some to Meta’s Superintelligence group, some to Google DeepMind, which just so happens to build Gemini, the brain Apple is now renting to make Siri look clever again.

So this FYI isn’t about whether the quarter was good. It was. At least in terms of being better than last years, which isn’t saying much.

This is about what it cost Apple to get here, and how much hopium you have to inhale to believe this is sustainable.

When everyone on CNBC, in the notes, and on the forums is screaming BUY THE RECORD QUARTER, blaming options “manipulators” (apparently according to a bland comment I was forwarded, I am amongst them - for the record I don’t trade options, but, well thanks for thinking I can wag AAPL’s tail), the smart move is usually to step back, look at the five‑year chart, glance at who’s actually building the brains now.

hint: Google, not Apple– and quietly stay seated while the cheerleaders do another lap.

So Who just left?

Stuart Bowers, “one of Apple’s most senior executives working on Siri,” has quit and gone to Google DeepMind. He was the guy Rockwell put in charge of making Siri less of an answering machine and more of a grown‑up assistant.

And you could hardly make this up - he’s going to Google to work on Gemini. There is a total circle jerk going on between Google and Apple at the moment and at the point, untangling who is doing what and where, and why, is something not even Grok can answer.

• What was he doing at Apple?
  Bowers was originally a top leader on Apple’s doomed self‑driving car project, then recycled into Siri as the data/evaluation brain – specifically tasked with improving how Siri decides what to say and how quickly it says it. Last year his role was expanded, reporting directly to new Siri chief Mike Rockwell.
• Where did he go?
  Google DeepMind, to work on Gemini – the same family of models Apple is now integrating into iOS 26.4 and beyond to power its “more personalised” Siri revamp. So the guy meant to fix Siri at Apple now helps build the off‑the‑shelf brain Apple is renting.
• Who else just walked?
  In the same batch: AI researchers Yinfei Yang (starting a new company), Haoxuan You and Bailin Wang (both to Meta, one to its Superintelligence group), and Zirui Wang (also to Google DeepMind, again on models powering Apple’s own features).
• Why it matters (beyond the meme value):
  These aren’t random mid‑level devs; they’re the people inside the AFM / Siri stack who were supposed to help Apple get off the canvas after a decade of Siri underperformance. Apple is still briefing that two new versions of Siri are coming – Gemini‑powered this year, plus a later in‑house chatbot “competitive with Gemini 3” – but the attrition rate on the people meant to ship that is now part of the story.

Skinny (that’s English for “My Take”) in one line:

The executive asked to teach Siri how to answer properly has left to work on Gemini at Google, the model Apple will now use to make Siri look clever.

You couldn’t ask for a neater visual metaphor of who actually owns Apple’s “intelligence” layer in 2026.

Apple and Gemini? Pathetic.

After 15 years of squandered AI potential, Apple has done the unthinkable: outsourcing Siri’s brain to Google. It’s not strategy; it’s surrender. A company that once owned the stack now rents intelligence, proving once again that culture, not hardware or software is Apple’s real unfinished product.

TOMMO.FYITommo_UK

Tommo_UK, London, Friday, 30th January 2026

© 2026 Tommo_UK / tommo.fyi

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