Apple has initiated a bold effort to boost its artificial intelligence skills by enticing several AI experts from Google and setting up a clandestine research base in Zurich, Switzerland, According to a Financial Times report.
An analysis of LinkedIn profiles shows that Apple has acquired at least 36 AI experts from Google since 2018, when the tech giant appointed John Giannandrea, Google’s former head of AI, to manage its machine learning projects.
While Apple’s major AI teams are based in California and Seattle, the firm has lately expanded its AI footprint by establishing AI-specific offices in Zurich. This decision is said to be motivated by Apple’s acquisitions of local AI startups FaceShift (VR) and Fashwell (image recognition).
The report suggests that employees at Apple’s secretive Zurich lab, known as the “Vision Lab,” have been involved in researching the underlying technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar products based on large language models (LLMs). Their focus has been on designing more advanced AI models that can incorporate text and visual inputs to generate responses to queries.
Apple’s recent work on LLMs is seen as a natural progression from the company’s long-standing efforts with Siri, its virtual assistant. “During the time that I was there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks,” said Chuck Wooters, a former Apple employee who worked on Siri.
In addition to Giannandrea, Apple’s key AI team includes notable ex-Google experts such as Samy Bengio, a former leading AI scientist at Google, and Ruoming Pang, who previously led Google’s AI voice recognition research and now runs Apple’s “Foundation Models” team concentrating on LLMs.
Apple’s cautious approach to AI rollouts is due to concerns about language models producing wrong or problematic answers, according to Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a significant figure in neural network history and current Apple employee.
With iOS 18 anticipated to include new generative AI tools for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and other apps, Apple’s efforts to expand its AI capabilities are expected to pay off shortly. The Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts on June 10, is expected to get the first glimpse at these AI technologies.
