Apple hires dozens of AI experts from Google, builds secret research lab

San Francisco: Apple has hired dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) experts from Google and formed a "secretive European laboratory" in Zurich to house a new team of staff tasked with developing new AI models and products, a media report said on Tuesday.

Based on an analysis of LinkedIn profiles conducted by The Financial Times, the iPhone maker has recruited at least 36 specialists from Google since 2018, when it poached John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive.

Apple's primary AI team operates from California and Seattle, but the company has recently expanded offices in Zurich, Switzerland, dedicated to AI work.

As per the report, the employees working at the lab have been actively involved in Apple's research on the fundamental technology that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and other similar products based on large language models (LLMs).

The focus of the research has been on developing more advanced AI models that can incorporate both text and visual inputs to generate responses to user queries.

The report suggested that Apple's recent work on LLMs is an expected outcome of the company's decade-long research on Siri.

Presently, the tech giant's top AI team comprises notable ex-Google personnel such as Giannandrea, former head of Google Brain, which is now a part of DeepMind.

Samy Bengio, currently senior director of AI and ML research at Apple, was also previously a top AI scientist at Google.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has designated iPadOS, Apple's operating system for tablets, as a "gatekeeper" under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA).