Samsung Electronics Integrates North America AI Centers... Hires Apple 'Siri' Executive

Centralized Operation, Enhancing Efficiency

Samsung Electronics has integrated two North American research centers focused on artificial intelligence (AI) technology and recruited an executive who was in charge of Apple's voice assistant Siri, Bloomberg reported on the 11th (local time).

Samsung Electronics is merging research centers located in Toronto, Canada, and Mountain View, California, USA, to create a new organization called the North America AI Center. According to internal documents confirmed by Bloomberg, this move aims to centralize the organization to improve operations and increase efficiency.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

The head of the integrated research center is Murat Akcakak, a former Apple executive. Akcakak was responsible for strategizing Apple's voice assistant Siri. Siri is a multimodal personal digital assistant model that recognizes the context of text or conversations to enable interactive communication. Before Apple, he worked as an AI researcher at Microsoft (MS), developing voice assistants.

Samsung and Apple declined to comment on this matter.

According to sources, Samsung made this announcement around the same time Apple recently unveiled its expansion plans in the AI field.

Bloomberg explained that these moves by Samsung and Apple signal that the world's largest IT companies are becoming more aggressive in the AI sector.