Apples Orchard of AI Talent

January 1, 2018

Here’s an analysis that will be of interest to competitive artificial intelligence professionals. Fast Company reports on its own research in the piece, “Where Apple Recruits Its AI Talent, According to LinkedIn.” Writer Jared Newman begins:

Apple appears to have doubled its headcount in artificial intelligence and related fields since 2014–and more than tripled its number of PhD holders in the sector–as tech companies race to build a generation of smarter products. That’s one conclusion from an analysis of more than 600 Apple employees who specialize in machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and other disciplines related to AI. To help us understand where Apple is getting its AI talent, Fast Company created a database from publicly available LinkedIn profiles, searching for employees who either defined their jobs as “scientist” or “researcher” or listed AI-related skills in their resumes. This analysis certainly does have some limitations: It won’t account for employees who have defined their jobs in vague terms on their profiles, self-reported inaccurately or incompletely, or have avoided sharing their employment information on LinkedIn entirely. Apple has reportedly discouraged employees from announcing their AI jobs on LinkedIn in the past, so blind spots in our study are inevitable. Still, this analysis provides a broad snapshot of Apple’s response to a growing AI arms race in the tech industry.

The article goes on to share several graphs representing Apple AI hiring trends, like the proportion of Ph.D. to non-Ph.D., hires by year; or the percentages of employees obtained from acquisitions, universities or government organizations, and other businesses. We can also see from which businesses and universities Apple have hired most, and which acquisitions brought the company the most AI talent. See the article for all the details.

Cynthia Murrell, January 1, 2018

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