Tim Hardwick
Apple has poached dozens of artificial intelligence experts from Google and created a “secret European lab” in Zurich to house a new team of employees tasked with creating new artificial intelligence models and products, according to a paid Financial Times report.
Apple has hired at least 36 people, according to an FT analysis of LinkedIn profiles. Google since 2018, when the company lured John Giannandrea as its chief artificial intelligence officer.
Apple's core artificial intelligence team is based in California and Seattle, but the company recently expanded offices dedicated to work in the field. artificial intelligence, in Zurich, Switzerland. Apple's acquisitions of local artificial intelligence startups FaceShift (VR) and Fashwell (image recognition) are believed to have influenced its decision to build a secret research laboratory in the city known as the “Vision Lab”.
According to a report by Lab Staff participated in Apple's research into the underlying technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and similar large language model (LLM) products. The focus has been on developing more advanced artificial intelligence models that incorporate textual and visual inputs to answer queries.
The report states that Apple's recent work on LLM is a natural outgrowth of the company's work on Siri over the past years. last decade:
The company has long recognized the potential of “neural networks” – a form of artificial intelligence inspired by the way neurons interact in the human brain, and the technology that underlies such revolutionary products like ChatGPT.
Chuck Wooters, a conversational AI expert and master's student who joined Apple in December 2013 and worked on Siri for almost two years, said: “In the time I've been there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was towards neural architecture for speech recognition. Even then, before large language models came along, they were strong proponents of neural networks.”
Apple's leading artificial intelligence team now includes prominent former Google employees. employees such as Giannandrea, the former head of Google Brain, which is now part of DeepMind. Sami Bengio, now senior director of artificial intelligence and machine learning research at Apple, was also previously a senior artificial intelligence scientist at Google. The same goes for Ruoming Pan, who leads Apple's “Foundation Models” team, which specializes in large language models. Pang previously led AI speech recognition research at Google.
In 2016, Apple acquired Perceptual Machines, an AI-powered generative image detection company founded by Ruslan Salakhutdinov of 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 technology godfather Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google last year citing concerns about the dangers of generative artificial intelligence.
Salakhutdinov told the FT that one of the reasons for Apple's slow adoption of artificial intelligence was the tendency of language models to give incorrect or problematic answers: “I think they're just a little more cautious because they can't release something. they can't fully control,” he said.
iOS 18 is rumored to include new generative AI features for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Apple Music, Messages, Health, Keynote, Numbers, Pages and others. Programs. These features are expected to be powered by Apple's LLM, although Apple has also reportedly discussed partnerships with Google, OpenAI and Baidu.
- Should Apple kill Siri and start over?
The first look at Apple's planned artificial intelligence features is due in just over a month, with iOS 18 set to debut at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts on June 10.
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