Apple vs Google: Battle for AI Supremacy Heats Up

Apple, having a reputation for being late to step into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, has been revealed to be making efforts to strengthen its AI capabilities by actively recruiting AI talents from Google and establishing a secret research lab in Zurich, Switzerland.

On the 30th of last month, the Financial Times (FT) reported that an analysis of Apple’s job postings and papers indicates that Apple has brought in at least 36 experts from Google since recruiting John Giannandrea, Google’s AI head, as its chief AI officer in 2018. Apple has reportedly extracted workers from Microsoft Corporation (MS), Netflix, Meta, and others.

The FT suggests that these individuals have established an AI base in Zurich, Switzerland. Professor Luc Van Gool of the ETH Zurich revealed that Apple has established a research lab known as Vision Lab in Zurich by acquiring local Swiss AI startups such as virtual reality company Faceshift and image recognition company PAWS. Employees at the lab have been researching foundational technologies to present products similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI. The lab has also been hiring experts in the field of generative AI from two places in Zurich.

While companies like MS, Google, Amazon, and others are making aggressive moves by investing billions of dollars in AI startups, Apple has kept quiet about its AI plans. Industry insiders believe Apple is researching ways to run generative AI technologies on mobile devices, rooted in this secret lab. This means enabling generative AI to operate on the device itself without the necessity of internet or cloud connections. According to the FT, six former Google employees hired by Apple in the last two years publicized a paper in March stating that Apple developed a product line of AI models named MM1 that generate responses using text and visual input. Over the past decade, Apple has acquired about 20 AI startups that applied AI inference in image and video recognition, data processing, search functions, and music content curation.