Apple is expanding its AI team and seems to have had its eye out for Google’s. Looks like the tech giant is putting together a dream task force for their AI innovations as they successfully attracted at least 36 of Google’s AI team, employees from other competitors, like Amazon and Microsoft, and swallowed some two to three AI startups, according to the Financial Times.

A research paper and employee information on LinkedIn are reportedly behind this exposé. In one of Apple’s research papers from last month, six of the authors listed were ex-Google employees recruited within the past two years. Founders of startups that have shifted to Apple have been flagged from their profiles on LinkedIn.

They’re being suspiciously secretive about their plans, too. Rather than working in their California or Seattle offices like most of the Apple horde, this tech department has been shipped to work in a new laboratory in Zurich that was built with the help of two of the company’s acquired AI tech startups, according to Professor Luc Van Gool from Swiss university ETH Zurich. The hiring has not stopped, too and it’s all being kept on the down-low, says the salmon-colored paper.

What the heck are they working on? Apple hasn’t shared its AI plans, yet — despite falling behind its competitors. However, an industry insider believes the company is working on creating generative AI that is embedded into their smartphones. Whereby AI chatbots and apps would function on the device’s hardware and software rather than rely on “cloud services” in data units.

This suggests that they could be enhancing the AI they already have, a.k.a Siri, who is having a great run with the tech giant: Conversational AI expert and former Apple employee, Chuck Wooters, explained that during his time there the team was pushing to “move to a neural architecture for speech recognition.” This refers to neural networks — a machine learning program that mimics the human brain to process information.

They might also be introducing all-new AI features. Other than the employees they’ve recruited, Apple has also acquired two dozen startups that focus on AI reasoning to image and video recognition, data processing, search capabilities, and music content curation. Ruslan Salakhutdinov, the founder of one of these start-ups, said that Apple is focused on the idea of doing “as much as you can on the device.” And, in order to handle that amount of AI model data, the company will need more powerful chips with dynamic random access memory (Dram).

We might see what they have been up to soon. Seeing as Apple’s Worldwide DevelopersConference is starting on 10 June, it may be the place and time that the company introduces the generative AI features that they’ve been working on.

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