Samsung has reportedly pulled off a major coup by hiring a former Apple executive to lead its newly created artificial intelligence (AI) division. According to a report, the South Korean tech giant has internally announced the hiring of Murat Akbacak, who led the department responsible for developing conversational and contextual artificial intelligence for Siri. He will now lead Samsung’s AI center for North America, which is said to be a merger of two different AI centers operating on the continent. Notably, Apple also announced several AI capabilities for Siri at WWDC 2024 on Monday.
Samsung is reportedly hiring a former Apple executive
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman cited unnamed people familiar with the matter in the report and claimed that Samsung announced the internal hiring of Murat Akbacak this week. At the time of writing, Akbacak’s LinkedIn profile still shows the current designation of Apple’s head of conversational and contextual AI in Siri. Interestingly, if the timeline of the report is to be believed, the former head of Siri joined the rival around the same time Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, where Siri AI capabilities became a major talking point.
Akbacak will reportedly lead Samsung’s newly established AI center for North America. The tech giant recently merged two different AI centers, located in Toronto and Mountain View, California, into a single North American division. According to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, the centralized research unit was created to improve operations and increase efficiency.
The same memo reportedly mentions that Akbacak at Apple was “responsible for defining and implementing a strategy for Siri, Apple’s personal digital assistant, with a focus on personalization, contextualization and advances in conversational and multimodal artificial intelligence.” The Apple executive joined the iPhone maker in January 2015 and has served the company for nearly a decade. Namely, the announcement has not yet been made public.
At WWDC 2024, Apple made several announcements related to artificial intelligence. Siri can now understand natural language and contextual cues in user commands and perform complex tasks. The virtual assistant is also deeply integrated with several native applications.
The tech giant also unveiled its in-house Apple Intelligence, which consists of an on-device AI model and a cloud-based AI model that will be powered by the company’s Private Cloud Compute.
