Apple’s AI team is burning over $1 mn a day, is on a hiring spree recruiting from Google, OpenAI

While Google and Microsoft are engaged in a competitive AI race through their Bard AI and Bing AI, along with a plethora of other AI tools, Apple, has remained relatively quiet on the AI front. However, recent reports suggest that Apple is making substantial investments in AI and is likely to unveil several AI tools in the future. According to a report initially featured in The Information, Apple is dedicating substantial financial resources to AI, with millions of dollars being invested on a daily basis. The company is actively working on the development of various AI models across multiple teams. One of these teams, known as “Foundational Models,” focuses on conversational AI and is led by Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, who joined the company in 2018 to enhance Siri’s capabilities. This unit comprises around 16 members, including former Google engineers. In addition to the conversational AI team, several other teams within Apple are also involved in AI-related projects. These projects include the development of an image generation model, multimodal AI, a chatbot intended to interact with AppleCare customers, and another chatbot designed to streamline complex tasks with Siri. Furthermore, insiders have revealed that Apple’s Ajax GPT, its most advanced Large Language Model (LLM), has been trained on an impressive “200 billion parameters” and is touted to be more powerful than OpenAI’s LLM GPT-3.5, which served as the foundation for the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Earlier this year, reports indicated that Apple was aggressively hiring talent in the Generative AI field, advertising positions like Multimodal Generative Modeling Research Engineer and Visual Generative Modeling Research Engineer on its US career page. In March, there were also reports suggesting that Apple was experimenting with generative AI technology, although the company has not officially confirmed these developments. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, during his visit to India this year to inaugurate the first Apple Store in the country, expressed enthusiasm for AI. He highlighted AI’s significance in various Apple products, citing features like ECG and fall detection in the Apple Watch that leverage AI. Cook reaffirmed Apple’s commitment to remaining at the forefront of artificial intelligence. In summary, Apple appears to be making substantial investments in AI, with several AI projects in the pipeline, as it seeks to stay competitive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.