Apple has lost around a dozen of its artificial intelligence staff, including top researchers, to rivals as the iPhone maker struggles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley’s ferocious AI talent war.
Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Cohere have scooped up staff from Apple’s AI team since the start of the year as they rush to gain a competitive edge in the nascent technology, fuelling concerns the US tech giant is falling further behind in the global AI arms race.
OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers, in recent months, while Canadian AI start-up Cohere hired machine learning scientist Liutong Zhou in June.