Apple Ramps Up Hiring of Artificial Intelligence Experts

Apple is ramping up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts and recruiting from PhD programs, reports Reuters. The company has posted dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff in an effort to challenge Google on giving users what they want before they ask.

As part of its push, the company is currently trying to hire at least 86 more employees with expertise in the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, according to a recent analysis of Apple job postings. The company has also stepped up its courtship of machine-learning PhD's, joining Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in a fierce contest, leading academics say.

AI will likely be more of a challenge for Apple due to its strict stance on privacy. Machine learning relies on a vast amount of data to make predictions about what users might want. While Siri has Apple's most liberal privacy policy, holding on to data for up to six months, other services, such as Apple Maps, retain information for as little as 15 minutes. This makes it difficult


"They want to make a phone that responds to you very quickly without knowledge of the rest of the world," said Joseph Gonzalez, co-founder of Dato, a machine learning startup. "It's harder to do that."

CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at the University of Washington, said, "In the past, Apple has not been at the vanguard of machine learning and cutting edge artificial intelligence work, but that is rapidly changing,” he said. “They are after the best and the brightest, just like everybody else.”

Apple is unveiling iOS 9 on Wednesday and it will bring some enhancements to Siri that give you helpful suggestions before you even ask.

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