Nothing wrong with poaching, but if this is true it would suggest that Apple has not kept up in this area. There has been this distant hope/rumor that Apple has secretly been doing all this great stuff with AI. This would suggest that this is not the case, and they are well behind.
We will see how this is spun at WWDC.
Perhaps they should have been putting resources here instead of their car project over the last few years.
Apple has followed a strict on device policy with their AI projects so far, which of course is a challenge, but it has one big advantage for the customer: privacy. In my opinion, Apple has been playing in the AI area for years. Assistants like Siri are to some degree nothing else but “AI”. As far as I am concerned, Siri might have been a “revolutionary” product when it launched, but unfortunately it never really progressed from that starting point.
This year, Apple apparently is willing to recognize that a pure on device AI approach may not be enough. This report does fit into other reports like Apple renews talks with Open AI (Reuters / based on Bloomberg). Then again, there are those M4 and iPhone 16 rumors about allegedly leveraging AI on device to a new level. We will know for sure in the fall, where Apple really is located at in this whole AI saga and what their intentions are.
I may sound naive, but I do not necessarily think that Apple does not have kept up in this matter. The whole AI thing is gaining speed, but this gold rush is starting to show real world implications that will be dealt with by regulators (privacy, copyright law and what not). I do not see any player out there really having nailed “AI” so far.
I know that the old saying that Apple is never first on the stage, but when they get on it, they get it right, will eventually prove to be a fallacy. But… If they get it right in 2024 or 2025, they very well may end up being on the right track after all.
Not sure what the point of the headline is. This type of thing happens daily in every industry across the globe. So what.
It’s been reported that Microsoft became “very, very worried” about Google’s capabilities in artificial intelligence back in 2019. And that may be what prompted their investment in OpenAI.
I think it’s likely that Apple didn’t start getting serious about generative AI until some time after Microsoft.
Apple is spending millions of dollars per day on generative AI training compute budget
Apple hires former Google data center AI exec to lead multi-cloud effort
Another way to look at this is that Apple have been working on a variety of AI projects, including generative AI, and are now ramping up to support product delivery at scale.
I do not know if this will be the case, but to me this whole meme that Apple is behind on AI is very similar to the “Apple must deliver a netbook or risk becoming irrelevant in the laptop space” pundit ‘analysis’ of yore. And we know how that worked out. Feel free to substitute your favorite “Apple must do X or risk Y” meme.
I know! It is to drive clicks! Google is laying people off, and Apple is hiring. So some Google folks are going to end up at Apple, even it they aren’t the ones being laid off. As noted people change jobs all the time.
The current meme is Apple is behind in AI and all these stories are ‘proof’ of that. I’ll repeat, I do not know what Apple is doing. And outside of the folks at Apple, neither does anyone else. But rumor mongers abhor a vacuum, thus silly (non)stories such as this one.
That’s entirely possible. IMO Apple has to present a good AI story, in part, to satisfy investors. But unlike Microsoft and Google, etc. Apple is a consumer electronics and services company.
They don’t provide business solutions so their on-device AI offerings will likely target individuals. That could result in more frequent hardware upgrades, and possibly increased revenue from optional subscription AI features?
CHICAGO – Eight newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the tech giants stole their copyrighted articles to “fuel the commercialization of their artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.”
The complaint said OpenAI and Microsoft “purloined” millions of articles from the newspapers without permission or payment to train their generative AI software and dramatically boost their businesses.