Big companies make strategic hires all the time, and sometimes that means adding new hires from competing brands. In this case, Apple is adding one Ian Goodfellow, formerly one of Google’s leading artificial intelligence engineers, to its roster.

CNBC has the report on Thursday. Apple has hired Goodfellow to be parts of its “Special Projects Group”, where he will be leading the team as the director of machine learning. Goodfellow is known as the “father of general adversarial networks, or GANs”, which is explained as such:

“Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as general adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text.

GAN systems have been used to generate “deepfake” fake media content.”

According to Goodfellow’s LinkedIn profile page, he left Google and joined Apple last month. And before enlisting with Google, he was working at OpenAI.

This is not Apple’s first major hire from Google. Back in April of last year, Apple brought on John Giannandrea, who was previously leading Google’s Search & AI efforts. And, most recently, Giannandrea was promoted to run the CoreML, Siri, and machine learning teams at Apple.

What, exactly, Goodfellow will be doing at Apple remains to be seen.

Our Take

This is another huge hire for Apple, and one that will more than likely have a huge impact on the company moving forward. Of course, what that means moving forward for consumer products remains to be seen. Either way, it’s a big win for Apple as far as new hires are concerned.

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What do you think of Apple’s newest addition?

[via CNBC]