Apple's latest hire could signal a big shift in the company's approach to AI

Every big company in Silicon Valley is chasing artificial intelligence, the increasingly powerful computer software that can learn from big sets of data almost like a human does. And Apple just hired one of the big guns of AI research, as the company continues to try to prove that it is not falling behind Google and its other rivals in the hot field. Ruslan Salakhutdinov announced on Twitter on Monday that he's joining Apple as a director of AI research. Salakhutdinov will continue to do work at Carnegie Mellon University, where he advises and does research on deep learning, a key AI technique. His hiring raises the question of whether Apple's growing AI team will take a more academic approach to AI research going forward.