Apple, the $2.7tn tech company, has poached dozens of AI expert staff from Google  to set up a secretive European laboratory, “Vision Lab”,  in Zurich for developing AI models for AI smartphones. Apple even acquired two local AI start-ups – Virtual Reality group FaceShift and image recognition company Fashwell, to power products such as Open AI’s ChatGPT chatpot. According to insiders Apple is clearly focused on deploying generative AI on its mobile devices, a breakthrough that would allow AI chatbots and apps to run on the Apple phone’s own operating system and hardware rather than powered by cloud services in data centres. Tim Cook, CEO has told analysts Apple “has been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies” and investing and innovating ”responsibly” around the new technology. Apple is fully aware of the potential of “neutral networks” a form of AI inspired by how neurons interact in the brain and a technology that underpins breakthrough products such as ChatGPT. Chuck Wooters, an expert in conversational AI says Siri group is to move to a neutral architecture for speech recognition. In 2016, Apple bought Perpectual Machines, a group founded by Russian Salakhutdinov, who studied at the University of Toronto under Godfather of technology, Gefforey Hinton, who left Google last year citing dangers of generative AI research at Apple until 2020, and two of his students at Carnegie Melon University, which worked on generative AI-powered image detection.  Apple’s top team includes Giannandrea  who previously oversaw Google Brain, Google’s AI lab, which is now DeepMind, Samy Bengio, senior director of AI and MI research, was formerly Google’s top AI scientists, Ruoming Fang, who leads Apple’s  “foundation Models” team working on LLMs, previously led Google’s AI speech recognition research. In past 10 years Apple has bought two dozen AI start-ups for AI reasoning to image and video recognition, data processing, search capabilities and music content curation.

Founders from Musicmetric, Emotient, Silk Labs, PullString,CamerAI, Fashwell, Special Edge, InductivInc, Vilynx, AI Music, and WaveOne all still work at Apple according to their LinkedIn Profiles.