San Francisco: Apple has hired dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) experts from Google and established a “secret European laboratory” in Zurich that will house a recent team of employees tasked with developing recent artificial intelligence models and products, the press reported on Tuesday.
An analysis of LinkedIn profiles by the Financial Times shows that the iPhone maker has hired at least 36 specialists from Google since 2018, when John Giannandrea became chief artificial intelligence officer.
Apple’s core AI team is based in California and Seattle, but the company recently expanded offices in Zurich, Switzerland, specializing in AI work.
According to the report, lab staff were actively involved in Apple’s research on the core technology that underpins OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and other similar huge language model (LLM) products.
Research has focused on developing more advanced artificial intelligence models that can incorporate text and visual data to generate answers to user queries.
The report states that Apple’s latest work on LLM is an expected result of the company’s decade-long research into Siri.
Currently, the tech giant’s top AI team includes prominent former Google employees such as Giannandrea, the former head of Google Brain who is now part of DeepMind.
Samy Bengio, currently senior director of AI and machine learning research at Apple, was also previously a top AI specialist at Google.
Meanwhile, the European Commission has designated iPadOS, Apple’s operating system for tablets, as a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
