Apple has reportedly raided Google’s AI teams, hiring dozens of the search giant’s AI engineers to build its own team.

Apple is working to catch up with rivals in the AI field, and it reportedly has gone to great lengths to leapfrog the competition, including hiring dozens of Google’s AI engineers. According to the Financial Times, by way of MacRumors, as many as 36 of Google’s AI engineers have jumped ship to Apple.

FT discovered the scale of defections by combing through LinkedIn profiles to see where engineers worked and how their job history had changed. Many of the Google defectors have reportedly been working at a Zurich-based “secretive European Laboratory.”

The reports indicates that Apple is well aware of the shortcomings of existing LLM models and seems intent on avoiding the trouble many companies have already experienced, such as incorrect answers and hallucinations. As a result, Apple seems focused on building more advanced AI models, such as neural networks.

Per MacRumors:

The company has long been aware of the potential of “neural networks” — a form of AI inspired by the way neurons interact in the human brain and a technology that underpins breakthrough products such as ChatGPT.

Chuck Wooters, an expert in conversational AI and LLMs who joined Apple in December 2013 and worked on Siri for almost two years, said: “During the time that I was there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks.”

In our own coverage, we outlined the reasons we believe Apple may be poised to leapfrog other AI companies. If FT’s report is correct, it seems that is exactly what Apple is on track to do.