Samsung Merges Two AI Research Centers in North America, Hires Apple's Ex-Executive

TapTechNews June 12th, according to a report by Bloomberg today, sources say that Samsung is merging two AI technology research centers in North America and has hired a former senior executive from Apple to run the new agency.

The report says that Samsung announced this news internally this week and is creating a new institution called 'North American AI Center', combining the teams in Toronto, Canada and Mountain View, California, US to improve operations and efficiency.

The seasoned former senior executive from Apple, Murat Akbacak, will take charge of this department. According to the internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, he was responsible for formulating and implementing the strategy of Siri, Apple's personal digital assistant, focusing on multiple fields such as personalization, contextualization, and conversational, multimodal AI.

This move is the latest sign that Samsung is increasingly aggressive in the AI field. The report says that for device manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple, AI and other functions are seen as a means for consumers to upgrade software and hardware'more frequently'. Currently, Samsung mainly uses Google's Gemini technology overseas to support its AI functions.

According to a previous report by TapTechNews, at the beginning of this year, a market research agency surveyed five European countries including France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Spain, as well as two countries, the US and Australia. It was found that Samsung's Galaxy AI marketing strategy actively promoted consumers to buy the Galaxy S24 series. One out of every four Galaxy S24 buyers said that Galaxy AI was a key reason for them to choose this phone (accounting for 27% among Australian buyers).