According to Financial Times, Apple has poached dozens of artificial intelligence experts from Google and created a "secret European laboratory" in Zurich. There, a new team of employees is working on creating new AI models and products.
Based on LinkedIn profile analysis conducted by the publication, Apple has hired at least 36 specialists from Google since 2018, when John Giannandrea became Apple's chief AI officer.
Apple's main artificial intelligence team operates in California and Seattle, but the company has recently expanded its offices in Zurich, Switzerland. It is believed that Apple's acquisition of local startups FaceShift (VR) and Fashwell (image recognition) influenced its decision to build a secret research laboratory in the city, known as the Vision Lab.
Laboratory employees have been involved in Apple's research on basic ChatGPT technology and other major speech models. Researchers primarily focused on developing more advanced artificial intelligence models that incorporate textual and visual data to provide answers to queries.
Chuck Wooters, an expert in conversational AI and a juris doctor, who joined Apple in December 2013 and worked on Siri for nearly two years, said: "While I was there, one of the pushes that happened in the Siri group was moving to neural architecture for speech recognition. even back then, prior to the advent of large language models, they were big proponents of neural networks".
Currently, Apple's leading AI group includes well-known former Google employees, such as Giannandrea, former head of Google Brain, who is now part of DeepMind. Samy Bengio, currently a senior director of AI research and machine learning at Apple, was also a leading AI scientist at Google. The same goes for Ruoming Pang, who leads Apple's "Core Models" team, which focuses on large language models. Pang previously led AI speech recognition research at Google.
In 2016, Apple acquired Perceptual Machines, a company working on AI-based generative image detection, founded by Ruslan Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon University. It is said that Salakhutdinov is a key figure in the history of neural networks and studied at the University of Toronto under the guidance of the "godfather" of technology Jeffrey Hinton, who left Google last year due to concerns about the dangers of generative AI.
Salakhutdinov told FT that one of the reasons for Apple's slow deployment of artificial intelligence is the tendency of language models to provide incorrect or problematic answers: "I think they're just a little more cautious, because they can't release what they can't fully control".
iOS 18 is expected to include new generative AI functions for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Apple Music, Messages, Health, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and other applications. These functions are expected to operate based on Apple's language model on the device, although Apple also reports partnerships with Google, OpenAI, and Baidu.
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