SVP is probably a very important position in corporate AAPL, however, I will feel more excited for Apple if someone like Chris Lattner would join/return as chief AI/ML engineer.
His experience seems to be entirely focused on compilers. He's a talented engineer and leader, and his decision to join Google Brain indicates interest in AI, but wouldn't the chief AI/ML engineer have some demonstrable expertise in that particular field?
That might be credited more to his role in creating Swift than his expertise in ML.
To be clear, I'm not claiming he's not capable of the role at some point. I don't know one way or the other. But his transition from compilers to AI seems fairly recent.
I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or 1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.
And TBH, it was him, who knows general computing from circuits to planet scale distributed systems, really enabled the AI as it today, at least inside Google.
I wonder at what point the pay becomes just a number. I am hoping people at Chris’s position are where they are because of the role, organization and the opportunity and not just because of money