Apple hires ex-Google engineer who was fired for speaking out against company's new AI

It’s not clear what Ghodsi’s role at Apple will be, but his expertise in the field of large language models could be an asset.<br><br>Former Google engineer Afshin (Ash) Ghodsi left Google on November 20th after a tumultuous tenure that saw him go from being an advocate for the company’s generative AI to someone who tried to sound the alarm that Google was rushing this technology to the market without sufficient consequences. Ghodsi has joined Apple in what will presumably be a similar role, despite Apple’s own misadventures in AI.<br><br>Ghodsi spent over 12 years at Google, but his departure from the company was anything but clean. Ghodsi had been an early proponent of Google’s AI efforts, but eventually became more outspoken about the technology, even speaking out against the company’s rollout of Gemini, Google’s chatbot. He has also been an outspoken advocate for caution and careful testing of AI models before they’re released out into the world.<br><br>Perhaps the most notable incident surrounding Ghodsi occurred about a month ago, when he said that Google was rushing to rollout AI technology without fully understanding its wider impact. His comments were widely reported in the media. A month later, Ghodsi was out of the company after a Google spokesperson said it had accepted his resignation “after careful consideration.”(coordination)<br><br>Ghodsi joins Apple at what’s an extremely important time for the company. Apple has seen its market valuation soar in recent months, largely due to its own AI efforts, which are focused around the tech giant’s virtual assistant, Siri.<br><br>Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, was the first virtual assistant and is still widely used, but Apple has been a laggard compared to the success of OpenAI and Google in generative AI. The company brought on John Giannandrea in 2018, a former chief of machine learning at Google, to oversee the Siri and Core ML teams. Since then, Apple has rapidly innovated and iterated on its AI and machine learning products, from the M2 chip to the large language model that powers the company’s new chatbot.<br><br>The hiring is a major coup for Apple, which is looking to establish itself at the forefront of AI technology, and could be seen as a major blow to Google which is desperately trying to claw its way back to the top.