‘Turf wars’ are reportedly taking place on the Apple team, which is in charge of creating Siri and other AI and machine learning projects.
Even Apple, the largest company in the world, cannot ignore how quickly AI is advancing. John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of artificial intelligence (AI), is dealing with the pressure of the situation. As his team struggles to keep up with competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, the executive faces a difficult challenge. The group in charge of creating Siri and other AI and machine learning projects is rumored to be bogged down in turf wars that are impeding their development. The competition to find the best talent is at the heart of this entire AI war.
According to a story by The Information, Google and Apple are vying for the services of three important engineers: Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker, and Anand Shukla. Although they left Apple to work on large-language models (LLMs) at Google, the trio contributed to the modernization of Apple’s search technology. These three engineers included two IIT graduates.
Venkatachary received his B. Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Madras and is currently the VP of Engineering, AI Product Growth at Google. IIT Kanpur is where Anand Shukla, a distinguished engineer at Google, received his bachelor’s degree in computer science. The two engineers’ LinkedIn profiles show that Venkatachary left Apple in October 2022 and Shukla left in November 2022.
The Information’s story claims that the developers thought Google was a better environment to work on LLMs. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, personally courted the organization. According to the allegation, Apple CEO Tim Cook made an effort to encourage the engineers to stay.
All three engineers are currently working on Google’s initiatives to lower training costs and boost the precision of LLMs and the products built using these models.
Apple’s products and services have so far been the main sources of its income. The business has not yet revealed its first LLM-based technology. On the other hand, Google has made Bard AI available for search in a few regions. One of the top competitors in the AI race, Microsoft, has already started incorporating AI and LLMs into its well-known products, like Bing Search and even Microsoft Office. It is yet unclear how Apple can catch up to its competitors in this area.
