For years, Apple lagged behind other tech giants like Google and Facebook when it came to incorporating the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology into its products.

That's changed over the past half decade, however. According to data published by GlobalData, between 2016 and 2020 Apple was the tech giant that acquired the greatest number of AI companies.

In doing so, it beat out Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Accenture, all of which also lay claim to a large number of acquisitions in this space.

Lots of AI Acquisitions

Companies snapped up by Apple include the likes of Emotient, Tuplejump Software, Turi, Flyby Media, Glimpse, Lattice Data, Pop Up Archive, RealFace, Shazam, DeskConnect, Silk Labs, Drive.ai, Asaii, Inductiv, Subverse, XNOR.ai, and others. 

Apple averaged around five acquisitions a year according to the list, with 2017 being its busiest year, with seven reported AI acquisitions. In total, Apple acquired some 25 AI companies during the period.

However, the fact that Apple does not publicize all of its acquisitions means that there may be others that were bought without Apple-watchers realizing.

With the likely exception of the ever-useful music recognition service Shazam, many of the names of the startups bought by Apple are smaller, lesser known, companies, although all have the potential to greatly improve Apple hardware and software through adding greater smarts to the various products.

Nicklas Nilsson, Senior Analyst on the Thematic Research Team at GlobalData, said:

Apple has gone on a shopping spree in efforts to catch up with Google (Google Assistant) and Amazon (Alexa). Siri was first on the market, but it consistently ranks below the two in terms of 'smartness', which is partly why Apple is far behind in smart speaker sales. Apple also want to make sure to keep its strong position within wearables. It is the dominant player in smartwatches. The acquisition of Xnor.ai last year was made to improve its on-edge processing capabilities, which has become important as it eliminates the need for data to be sent to the cloud, thereby improving data privacy.

Apple Is Trying to Win the AI Race

Simply buying AI companies is no guarantee that Apple wins the AI race, of course.

However, this number of acquisitions, combined with the continued hiring of top-level AI engineers like generative adversarial network (GAN) pioneer Ian Goodfellow in 2019, shows that Apple is keen to catch up---and maybe even overtake---some of its competition in this crucially important area of tech.

Whether or not it manages to do so remains to be seen. It certainly bodes well for customers who want better, smarter products, though.

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