Apple has recruited about 40 AI experts from Google to open a secret research lab called the Vision Lab in Zurich, Switzerland.



In recent years, Apple has been actively developing AI-related products such as the open source language model '

OpenELM ' and the multimodal large-scale language model ' Ferret-UI '. It has been reported that Apple has poached at least 36 AI experts from Google and established a research lab in Zurich, Switzerland to develop AI models and products.

Apple targets Google staff to build artificial intelligence team
https://www.ft.com/content/87054a60-dc4d-4238-a4b9-93ab48f22f56



Apple Hired Dozens of AI Experts From Google for a Secretive Zurich Research Lab - MacRumors

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/30/apple-hired-ai-google-experts-zurich-lab/

Apple Reportedly Poaches Google Engineers for AI 'Vision Lab' | PCMag
https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-reportedly-poaches-google-engineers-for-ai-vision-lab

Apple has a 'secretive' advanced AI lab in Europe; Google AI staff
https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/30/apple-advanced-ai-lab/

While most of Apple's AI team is based in the United States, the Financial Times reports that Apple's most advanced AI research is conducted in a laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland called the Vision Lab. Professor Luc Van Gool of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich reports that research at the Vision Lab began after Apple acquired two Zurich-based AI startups, virtual reality company FaceShift and image recognition company FashWell.

The Vision Lab also conducts research and development of the underlying technologies that power OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar products, as well as the design of more advanced AI models that incorporate text and visual input to generate responses to queries.



To date, Apple has poached at least 36 AI experts from Google to research and develop AI-related products, including John Giannandrea, who moved from Google's AI division, Google Brain (now Google DeepMind), to Apple in 2018. Similarly, Sammy Bengio, Apple's senior director of AI and language model research, was previously a key AI scientist at Google. In addition, Pan Luomin, who heads Apple's Foundation Models team, which focuses on large-scale language models, was previously chief of Google's AI speech recognition research division.

The Financial Times also reported a number of AI experts who have moved to Apple from other companies, including 10 from Amazon, as well as AI researchers from competitors such as Microsoft, Netflix, and Meta, and from research institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University.



Ruslan Salakhutdinov, founder of Perceptual Machines, a company acquired by Apple in 2016 that uses generative AI to detect images, said, 'One of the reasons Apple has been slower to deploy AI than other companies is that large-scale language models tend to give incorrect or problematic answers. Apple may be cautious about deploying AI because it cannot release something it cannot fully control.'

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