Apple hires several AI experts from Google to stay above rivals

• Apple has poached 36 specialists from Google since 2018 for its secret AI research lab.
• Apple is expected to roll out AI-powered features in its upcoming iOS 18 update on June 10.
• The generative AI features are expected to release for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Apple Music, Messages, Health, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and other apps.

Apple has hired several artificial intelligence experts from Google and has even created a secretive European laboratory – Vision Lab – in Zurich to house a new team of staff tasked with building new AI models and products.

According to Financial Times, Apple has attracted at least 36 specialists from its rival Google since it poached John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive in 2018.

The Big tech giants are investing millions in developing new AI products to stay ahead but Apple has been late into the AI party.

Apple’s main AI team operates out of California and Seattle, but the company has recently expanded offices dedicated to AI work in Zurich, Switzerland. Apple’s acquisition of local AI startups FaceShift (VR) and Fashwell (image recognitionis believed to have influenced its decision to build a secretive research lab.

Looking across wider AI technologies

Apple has also bought about two dozen AI start-ups in the past 10 years, focused on the application of AI reasoning to image and video recognition, data processing, search capabilities and music content curation.

The company has been advertising jobs in generative AI across two locations in Zurich, one of which has a particularly low profile.

Chief executive Tim Cook has told analysts Apple “has been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies” and investing and innovating “responsibly” around the new technology.

Looking at all possibilities

In 2016, Apple acquired Perceptual Machines, a company that worked on generative AI-powered image, detection, founded by Ruslan Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon University.

Salakhutdinov is said to be a key figure in the history of neural networks, and studied at the University of Toronto under the “godfather” of the technology, Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google last year citing concerns about the dangers of generative AI.

The report further hints that the employees in the secret lab are involved in research regarding the underlying technology that powers OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT and similar projects based on LLMs. The company aims to build a more advanced AI models that includes text and visual inputs to produce results.

According to Salakhutdinov, the reason behind the delay on Apple’s part is because the company is being quite cautious. He said, “They can’t release something they can’t fully control.”

Apple is expected to roll out AI-powered features in its upcoming iOS 18 update, set to debut at the Worldwide Developers Conference that kicks off on June 10, for the first time. The generative AI features are expected to release for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Apple Music, Messages, Health, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and other apps. It is also rumoured that these features will be powered by on-device LLMs.