Apple’s acquisition of Canadian AI startup DarwinAI in early 2024 is said to have resulted in dozens of the company’s employees joining Apple’s AI department. Alexander Wong, a co-founder of DarwinAI and an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo, has joined Apple as its chief AI officer as part of the deal. Apple has not explicitly acknowledged the acquisition of DarwinAI, stating only that it sometimes acquires small technology companies.
DarwinAI is an AI startup that provides services to improve visual inspection in the printed circuit board manufacturing process. However, Apple did not acquire DarwinAI for this reason; the company is interested in DarwinAI’s ability to make AI systems smaller and faster. Given Apple’s focus on AI running on devices like the iPhone, DarwinAI’s expertise in scaling down and speeding up AI systems is highly valuable.
While Apple has made several acquisitions of AI-related companies between 2016 and 2020, it has yet to launch any noteworthy AI products compared to competitors like Google or Microsoft. This is primarily attributed to Apple’s underperforming AI development department, lack of ambition among executives, and cautious approach towards AI.
Apple’s ineffective development team and cautious approach were reportedly why AI efforts with the Siri voice assistant failed. Nevertheless, the company invests heavily in AI development and has discussed multi-year contracts with various media agencies to train creative AI.
The upcoming iOS 18 will include AI-related functions, such as a new Siri based on large-scale language models like ChatGPT or Gemini, AI integration with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, and AI-powered autofill in messaging apps. Rumors suggest that many other AI-related functions may be introduced, such as automatically creating playlists with Apple Music using AI.