Ex-Apple Siri Guru To Lead Samsung's North American AI Division

Samsung Electronics Co. SSNLF has reportedly combined its two North American AI research centers and appointed a former Apple Inc. AAPL executive to head the newly formed division.

What Happened: Samsung has merged its AI research centers in Toronto and Mountain View, California, to establish the North American AI Center, reported Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The company made the internal announcement this week, coinciding with Apple’s highly anticipated expansion into AI.

It also announced the appointment of Murat Akbacak, a former Apple executive, to lead the new division. At Apple, Akbacak was “responsible for defining and executing the strategy for Siri, Apple's personal digital assistant, focusing on personalization, contextualization, and advancements in conversational and multimodal AI,” according to the memo.

He also has a background in AI research and voice assistants at Microsoft Corporation.

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Why It Matters: This development is the latest indication that the world’s largest technology companies are becoming more assertive in AI. For device manufacturers like Samsung and Apple, these features are viewed as incentives for consumers to upgrade their technology more often.

On June 10 at the WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple unveiled the iOS 18 update, which included quality-of-life improvements and integrated ChatGPT features in its iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Later, Apple also announced plans to integrate the Google Gemini AI model into its Apple Intelligence feature set.

Last week, when Nvidia Corporation briefly surpassed Apple as the second most valuable company in the world after Microsoft, tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated, “This is not just a comparison of Nvidia and Apple’s stock prices but a contrast between the strong growth trend of AI and the innovation challenges faced by consumer electronics.”

At the time of writing, Apple’s market capitalization stood at $3.176 trillion, while Samsung’s market cap was $364.22 billion.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.