The iPhone maker has undertaken a hiring spree in recent years to expand its global AI and machine learning teams.At the centre of this effort is stealing talent from rival Google. It began a few years earlier, in 2018, when it hired John Giannadrea, then a year later Ian Goodfellow, one of the most prominent names in the field who had previously worked at both Google and OpenAI. Since Giannandrea took over the charge of AI, Apple has hired at least 36 AI specialists away from the search giant.
Apple’s secret Swiss AI site working on multimodal language models
While Apple’s primary AI teams are based in California and Seattle, the company has also created a new outpost in Zurich. The “Vision Lab” in the Swiss city grew from Apple’s acquisitions of local AI startups FaceShift and Fashw, and this is where the company has been researching generative AI.
While its current AI ambitions appear vast, Apple’s interest in the neural network technology underpinning modern AI like ChatGPT dates back over a decade to work on its Siri voice assistant.
“During the time that I was there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition,” said Chuck Wooters, who joined Apple’s Siri team in 2013. “Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks.”
Employees at the secretive Zurich site have been involved in critical work on the underlying technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI language models that can generate human-like text from prompts. Their research has concentrated on developing advanced multimodal models, including visual data and text, to produce intelligent responses.
Apple going “responsibly” on releasing new AI products
Apple CEO Tim Cook has said the company has been investing heavily in “a wide range of AI technologies” and plans to innovate “responsibly” with the new technology. A key hire, former Google Brain researcher Ruslan Salakhutdinov, suggested Apple will take a more cautious approach to releasing generative AI than rivals due to concerns about biassed or incorrect outputs.
“I think they are just being a little bit more cautious because they can’t release something they can’t fully control,” Salakhutdinov told the FT.
The first glimpse of Apple’s generative AI work may come at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, with reports that iOS 18 could feature significant AI upgrades to apps like Siri, Messages, and Spotlight.