Samsung Reportedly Hires Ex-Apple Exec Murat Akbacak for AI Center

Samsung is reportedly hiring a former Apple executive to run its new artificial intelligence research center.

Heading the operation will be Apple veteran Murat Akbacak, who was “responsible for defining and executing the strategy for Siri, Apple’s personal digital assistant, focusing on personalization, contextualization and advancements in conversational and multimodal AI,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday (June 11), citing an internal Samsung memo.

Samsung did not reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The company made the decision around the same time Apple announced its high-profile AI plans, the report said. Samsung is opening a new North American AI Center, bringing together teams from California and Toronto to improve operations and boost efficiency, according to the report.

Siri is a big part of Apple’s AI plans, with the company’s new Apple Intelligence system giving the assistant “a major IQ boost.”

That will mean more natural language recognition (even when users change their minds mid-sentence), the ability to write instructions to Siri by double-tapping the lock screen, and an understanding of context across apps.

For its part, Samsung is working on giving its voice assistant, Bixby, an AI-powered makeover, a company executive said in March.

“With the emergence of generative AI and [large language model] technology, I believe that we have to redefine the role of the Bixby, so that Bixby could be equipped with generative AI and become more smarter in the future,” Won-joon Choi, executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile business, said at the time.

He added that this will “enable a more natural conversation and to work out an interface that supports the Samsung products in our ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote Wednesday (June 12) about Apple Intelligence’s Private Cloud Compute service for handling complex AI tasks, and what that means as businesses depend more and more on AI for sensitive data processing and analytics.

“Apple’s new Private Cloud Compute service represents the right step forward in the realm of data privacy and security and shows the direction in which all companies should be moving,” Yannik Schrade, CEO and co-founder of computing startup Arcium, told PYMNTS.

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