I've been hearing about them being wrong fairly frequently, especially on darker skinned people, for a long time now.
I can guarantee you haven't. I've worked in the FR industry for a decade and I'm up to speed on all the news. There's a story about a false arrest from FR at most once every 5 or 6 months.
You don't see any reports from the millions upon millions of correct detections that happen every single day. You just see the one off failure cases that the cops completely mishandled.
I'm assuming that of apple because it's been around for a few years longer than the current AI craze has been going on.
No it hasn't. FR systems have been around a lot longer than Apple devices doing FR. The current AI craze is mostly centered around LLMs, object detection and FR systems have been evolving for more than 2 decades.
We've been doing facial recognition for decades now, with purpose built algorithms. It's not mucb of leap to assume that's what they're using.
Then why would you assume companies doing FR longer than the recent "AI craze" would be doing it with "black boxes"?
I'm not doing a bunch of research to prove the point.