Apple has poached several AI experts from Sundar Pichai’s Google for a ‘secret’ laboratory in Zurich: Report

Apple has hired a few AI experts from Google to create a “secretive European laboratory” in Zurich, reported Financial Times. This team is reportedly put together to build AI models and products. The publication even analysed a few LinkedIn profiles that revealed that Apple has poached 36 specialists from Google since 2018. This is when the Tim Cook-led company recruited Google’s John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive.

Notably, Apple’s main AI team operates out of California and Seattle, but the company has opened new offices in Zurich, Switzerland for its AI work. Apple has recently acquired AI startups FaceShift (VR) and Fashwall (image recognition). They are expected to have influenced Apple’s decision to build a secretive research lab known as “Vision Lab” in the city.

The report further hints that the employees in the secret lab are involved in research regarding the underlying technology that powers OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT and similar projects based on LLMs. The company aims to build a more advanced AI models that includes text and visual inputs to produce results.

Currently, Apple’s AI team include some of the top ex-Google employees. Ex-Google personnel Giannandrea, former head of Google Brain, is now part of DeepMind. Former leading AI scientist at Google, Bengio is now senior director of AI and ML research at Apple. Former head of AI speech recognition research at Google, Ruoming Pang, now directs Apple's "Foundation Models" team focusing on large language models.

Apple has clearly been quite late to the AI party since all the major rivals like Google, Samsung, Microsoft and more have already dipped their toe in the AI pool. According to Ruslan Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon University, the reason behind the delay on Apple’s part is because the company is being quite cautious. He said, “They can't release something they can't fully control.” Salakhutdinov is the founder of Perpetual Machines, a company that worked on generative AI-powered image, detection, which was acquired by Apple back in 2016. He has studied under "godfather" of the technology, Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google last year citing concerns about the dangers of generative AI.

For the unversed, Apple is expected to roll out AI-powered features in its upcoming iOS 18 update for the first time. The generative AI features are expected to release for Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Apple Music, Messages, Health, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and other apps. It is also rumoured that these features will be powered by on-device LLMs.

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