Apple takes AI experts from Google and sets up secret laboratory in Switzerland | Companies

A Apple hired dozens of artificial intelligence experts who previously worked at Google and set up a secret laboratory in Zurich, in Switzerland, revealed the Financial Times. The newspaper analyzed several LinkedIn profiles, as well as public job advertisements and research articles, and found that the company has launched a hiring spree in recent years to expand its global AI team andmachine learning .

Since removing John Giannandrea from Google and hiring him as its top AI executive in 2018, Apple has at least 36 experts on its staff who were also from the search giant. Among them, Samy Bengio, senior director of AI and ML research, and Ruoming Pang, who leads the “Basic Models” team.

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Although most work in offices in California and Seattle in the United States, some have been assigned to Zurich. According to professor Luc Van Gool, from ETH Zurich university, the acquisitions of two local AI startups – FaceShift and Fashwell – led Apple to build a research laboratory known as “Vision Lab” in the city.

The Financial Times highlights that the company has been very discreet about its artificial intelligence development plans. Industry experts suggest that Apple is focused on deploying generative AI in its mobile devices, a breakthrough that would allow AI chatbots and apps to run on the iPhone’s own hardware and software, rather than being powered by cloud services in data centers. .

Over the past ten years, the apple brand has acquired about two dozen AI startups, focused on applying AI reasoning to image and video recognition, data processing, search capabilities and music content curation.

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, who worked as director of AI research at Apple until 2020, told the Financial Times that the company is focused on doing “as much as it can” with its cell phones, which will bring the need for more powerful chips with so-called memory. Dynamic Random Access (DRAM).

Another challenge to address is the tendency of language models to provide incorrect or problematic answers. “I think they are being a little more cautious because they can’t release something that they can’t fully control,” Salakhutdinov noted.

The expectation is that Apple’s new features in generative AI capabilities can be seen at the Worldwide Developers Conference, in June. At the beginning of the year, Tim Cook, the company’s CEO, gave signs that something big was coming.

“Our MO (modus operandi), so to speak, has always been to work and then talk about work, and not get in front of ourselves”, commented the executive in an earnings conference call. “And so, let’s consider that as well. But we have a few things we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.”