Why Apple Is Losing Ground in the AI Talent War (It’s Not Just Money)

Earlier this year, the Apple team working on the company’s artificial intelligence models wanted to release several of them as open-source software. Doing so would have shown Apple’s technical progress in AI while also harnessing the help of outside researchers to improve the models. Still, it also would have revealed to the public how dramatically the performance of the models dropped when Apple shrunk them to fit on iPhones, compared to versions for more powerful PCs or data center computers.

Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, didn’t want to go the open-source route, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. In an email, he told Ruoming Pang, head of Apple’s foundation models team, that there were already plenty of open-source models from other companies to incentivize research, the people said. While releasing the models as open source would show how the software underperformed certain rival models from Alibaba and Google, Federighi said he was more concerned the public would believe Apple was making too many compromises to get the software running on iPhones, the people said.