Apple adds another Google AI expert to its team

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Late last year, Apple hired former Googler John Giannandrea as the first senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy as the company promised to get more serious about AI. Apple seems to be keeping that promise with its new hire. Another former Googler, Ian Goodfellow, joined the company as the director of Machine Learning in the Special Projects Group. This division is in charge of working on next-generation tech for the company. There might even be a chance that Goodfellow will report to Giannandrea. But Goodfellow didn’t elaborate on what he’ll be working on at Apple.

He worked for Google from 2013 to 2016, and then from 2017 to 2019. His last role at Google was senior staff research scientist. The year he wasn’t in the company, he worked for the Elon Musk-funded AI research non-profit OpenAI. He is known for inventing a form of machine learning training approach that’s called generative adversarial network (GAN). It’s a technique that pits two neural networks against each other to create photos and videos that look real. As Engadget mentioned, bad actors have been using GANs to create “deepfake” media, a lot of them AI-generated fake porn that borrows faces of famous celebrities.