Financial Times analysis of hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as well as public job postings and research papers reveals that Apple has poached dozens of staff from Google in recent years to expand its global AI and Machine Learning team. The iPhone maker has attracted at least 36 specialists from its rival since it hired John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive in 2018.
Apple has also created a secretive European laboratory in Zurich. Professor Luc Van Gool from Swiss university ETH Zurich said Apple’s acquisitions of two local AI start-ups — virtual reality group FaceShift and image recognition company Fashwell — led Apple to build a research laboratory, known as its “Vision Lab”, in the city.
Industry insiders suggest Apple is focused on deploying generative AI on its mobile devices, a breakthrough that would allow AI chatbots and apps to run on the phone’s own hardware and software rather than be powered by cloud services in data centres.
Apple’s top AI team is now made up of former key figures from Google, including Giannandrea, who previously oversaw Google Brain, the search company’s AI lab which has since been merged DeepMind.
Samy Bengio, senior director of AI and ML research, was formerly one of Google’s top AI scientists. Ruoming Pang, who leads Apple’s “Foundation Models” team working on large language models, previously led Google’s AI speech recognition research.
The company also once hired Ian Goodfellow, another deep learning pioneer, but he returned to Google in 2022, protesting Apple’s return to work policy.
Source: Apple targets Google staff to build artificial intelligence team – https://on.ft.com/3waVM1L via @FT
