A new report today says that Apple has created a ‘secretive’ advanced AI lab in Europe, and it’s this facility which is responsible for some of its most ground-breaking artificial intelligence work.
The same report suggests that most of Apple’s AI specialists have been poached from Google, though this isn’t a great surprise give the background of the Cupertino company’s AI chief …
Advanced AI lab in Europe
While most of Apple’s AI team is based in the US, the paywalled Financial Times reports that some of the company’s most advanced work is being conducted at a ‘secretive’ lab in Zurich, Switzerland.
Professor Luc Van Gool from Swiss university ETH Zurich said Apple’s acquisitions of two local AI start-ups — virtual reality group FaceShift and image recognition company Fashwell — led Apple to build a research laboratory, known as its “Vision Lab”, in the city.
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.
While describing any Apple lab as ‘secretive’ seems tautological, the report does say that neighboring business were not even aware that it existed. It sounds like the company may have taken the same approach here as it did with some of its ill-fated Apple Car work: Using a shell company without any Apple branding.
The work described is a good match for that revealed in recent Apple AI research papers. These include editing photos using text commands (which you can try for yourself), creating animations from still images, and enabling ChatGPT-style generative AI to work locally on an iPhone for greater privacy.
Most Apple AI experts poached from Google
The paper also conducted an analysis geared to determining which AI specialists joined Apple, and where they came from. The analysis compromised a mixture of LinkedIn profiles, public job listings, and published research papers.
It identified at least 36 senior hires of former Google AI staff – more than three times as many as from any other individual company.
This isn’t too surprising. Back in 2018, Apple hired John Giannandrea, who previously headed up Google’s AI work. He was subsequently promoted to SVP of machine learning and AI. Giannandrea would of course know which Google AI engineers and execs he wanted working for him.
High expectations for Apple AI in iOS 18
We’re expecting this to be the year when Apple finally gives Siri a long-awaited upgrade to generative AI capabilities – with plenty of evidence to back this.
Bloomberg reported Apple referring to iOS 18 as one of the biggest iOS updates it has ever made, with AI the focus of this. The Financial Times specifically indicated that Siri would this year be powered by a ChatGPT-style generative AI model. 9to5Mac found evidence of exactly this in an iOS 17.4 beta. Even CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company is “excited to share the details of our ongoing work in this space [AI] later this year.”
We also recently pointed to three clues as to what iOS 18 Siri may be able to do.
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