Apple Poaches Top AI Talent from Google, Fuels Rumors of New AI-Powered Siri

In a recent report, the tech giant Apple has been trying to lure experts from Google in its efforts to catch up with big tech companies in its race to develop and launch highly capable AI models in its devices.

Apple has reportedly been snatching up experts from Google to build up its own in-house team for AI and machine learning. According to a news report by the Financial Times (FT), Apple has been on a hiring spree and has poached over a dozen experts from Google this past year.

Aside from this, to make their dream team even better, they have also bought up two local AI startups in Zurich to build their secret lab, which the company has named Vision Lab.

The report in the Financial Times also states that employees from its Zurich startups have been key in Apple’s research on high-level AI tech whose power will rival that of ChatGPT. The proof of Apple’s struggles came to light when the company released its own on-device LLM, the OpenELM (a series of four small open-source LLMs), earlier this month.

The models were released on Hugging Face and according to some industry insiders, Apple will be focusing on adding generative AI to its mobile devices. This means it would make it so that AI chatbots and apps could run via the built-in hardware of the iPhone rather than being powered by data centers and their respective cloud services.