Apple has poached dozens of artificial intelligence experts from Google and has created a secretive AI laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland as the company scrambles to catch up to rivals in AI.
Michael Acton for Financial Times:
The iPhone maker has particularly targeted workers from Google, attracting at least 36 specialists from its rival since it poached John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive in 2018.
While the majority of Apple’s AI team work from offices in California and Seattle, the tech group has also expanded a significant outpost in Zurich.
Zurich-based employees have been involved in Apple’s research into the underlying technology that powers products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. Their papers have focused on ever more advanced AI models that incorporate text and visual inputs to produce responses to queries.
The company has been advertising jobs in generative AI across two locations in Zurich, one of which has a particularly low profile. A neighbour told the FT they were not even aware of the office’s existence.
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.
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll hear all about it at WWDC or even a bit as soon as next Tuesday at Apple’s “Let Loose” special event.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
It’s utter crap to say Apple are playing catch up. Apple are doing the whole AI thing properly and as usual will show the world how it should be done. MacDaily News is very ingenious in their constant comments.
Until Apple shows its hands, they’re late to the game, working on BS cars et al. The pipeline… what’s in it, besides…
Cars are the biggest AI challenge. Everything Apple has put into that project will come back in one of three forms:
Killer AI for devices
Advanced CarPlay for OEMs
An autonomous vehicle when the AI is eventually ready
Greedy Wall Street investors are only interested in which companies claim that they’re the first and they’re going to get burned by those claims. Most companies won’t be able to monetize their A.I. claims. Running all those A.I. servers for LLMs are going to burn through cash in a hurry.
Cultist.
Once more, MDN spews the tedious FUD it once derided, and proclaims Apple is “scrambling to catch up”, while neglecting to mention that Apple has been poaching AI experts for years now, has been working on neural networks and acquiring AI and genAI companies for more than a decade. Apple is also not currently enmeshed in the numerous lawsuits that Microsoft/OpenAI and others are facing regarding infringement. In every other market they’re in, MDN lauds Apple for not jumping the gun just to be the first mover, but to get things right and re-shape the market. Come on already. Repeating the same stupid take over and over doesn’t make it less blinkered.
I guess we’ll see tomorrow what Apple has made of their investments to date since it sure didn’t seem to make any difference to how their most visible application for it, Siri, remains so far behind.
Siri, for all it’s faults, does not currently hallucinate or confidently supply me with incorrect information. Apple could have rushed to put neural network/LLM tech into Siri and then would have been lambasted for its glaring flaws. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t been working in that direction for years; they have.
Apple was poaching electric vehicle people, too.
How’d that work out?
Apple Hires 31-Year Ford Veteran to Ramp Up Electric-Car Work
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-hires-31-ford-veteran-155509812.html
It worked out fine; Apple’s vehicles are likely as good as any other company’s. Developing technology and then deciding it won’t be profitable enough to bring to market (yet) is not the same as “scrambling to catch up.” Apple also had a team working on televisions, and many other products that never see the light of day. Machine learning aka AI is already all over your iPhone. The technology developed for the car division will make its way into other products or will be dusted off for a future vehicle. Which is all beside the point.
One thing I’m increasingly aware of is just how -nowhere- the other players are with their AI.
Sure, there’s a Meta AI search field (it’s useless). Sure there’s AI chatbot in Twitter (weird). Sure there’s an AI assistant in Word (cool). Sure there’s AI in Photoshop (very cool).
So they’re spinning an ungodly number of servers on it.
None of these threaten to change the computing landscape.
No one has figured out the killer apps. No one has figured out the monetization.
People are already using AI in mega-productive ways.
It’s writing software. It’s eliminating human jobs.
Just because you don’t have an app (that you think is) using it, doesn’t mean it’s not already making a lot of money.