Apple to Start Publishing AI Research • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#101

Post by krenoten » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 8:39 AM UTC

seeekr wrote: post #54

airesQ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if anything can be considered successful when compared with Bell Labs. It is a very high bar to meet (given they mostly invented transistors, information theory, unix and c). The modern world is to great extent a byproduct of the experiment that was Bell Labs. Some laugh, and say that it was experiment that has gone awry.

As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about Bell Labs, its history, how it worked, etc: Why and how did it produce so much great research output? What was different or special about Bell Labs? Answers as well as pointers to other material appreciated!

They had an incentive to doggedly seek IP so that they could remain as entrenched as possible. They didn't plan on actually profiting from it in most cases, they just wanted to be the first ones there so that nobody else could be.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#102

Post by dovdovdov » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 8:43 AM UTC

Based on my Siri experience, I imagine a chimp pulling strings in a control room. :)

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#103

Post by krenoten » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 8:47 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #64

j1vms wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of these, in terms of quality of research output, pale by about an order of magnitude in comparison to Bell Labs for much of its existence (particularly in the era ~1940 to mid 1980s). They were the R&D benchmark for most improvements to IBM Research from the 1960s onward. Additionally IBM sought out its alumni and populated their ranks with notable management and research minds from the Bell Labs stable.

I once read a Microsoft research paper. I think its central premise had a fatal flaw: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b... The author confused continuity of the DECISION FUNCTION with continuity of the OUTCOME CURVE. In other words, an algorithm such as "keep trying to make a decision until you notice that t > C, after which always pick the left one" will in fact NOT have a continuous outco…

That's a great example of how even some of the most influential minds are fallible. Lamport is sort of the god of distributed systems, having invented vector clocks, paxos which is how there is any sanity in modern data centers (chubby, ZK, etcd, etc... are based on the core ideas of this), TLA+ for reasoning about correctness, so much great stuff. Check out some of these! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#104

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 9:26 AM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #83

leereeves wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it. Much like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming), which Xerox failed to profit from.

> "And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it." I'd suggest that was due to the anti-trust case against Bell more than anything else. For example, I believe AT&T were forbidden from selling Unix direct to consumers for many years, leading them to licence Unix to other entities (in the business and academic worlds).

Which is why UNIX got widespread in first place.

I very much doubt it would have been adopted in such scale, specially for the then startups trying to start a workstation market, if Bell could sell it at the same prices other OSes were being sold.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#105

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 9:37 AM UTC

hiddencost wrote: post #33

amelius wrote: post #4

Of course! What researcher would want to work for a company that prohibits scientific publications? I've always been amazed by their attitude. Look at Microsoft Research, and their enormous scientific output over the years. IBM and Google look bleak by comparison, and Apple is not even on the chart.

# of papers published is a poor metric (google's published like 40% as many papers, over a shorter period?) MSR has done cool work and important work, but google's publications have been often been major paradigm shifts. In a lot of ways they're currently way out ahead of everyone else.

Really?

MSR was one of the first companies bringing FP into mainstream developers tools with LINQ and F#.

Investing into dependent type programming via F*.

Making JavaScript scale via TypeScript (adopted by Google teams instead of Dart).

Sponsors Haskell and OCaml research.

Researches OS design that aren't yet another UNIX clone, namely memory safe OSes with Singularity, Midori, Drawbrige, theorem provers for device driver validation, P language, micro-kernels.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#106

Post by _1 » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

home_boi wrote: post #75

The free market wins. All the AI/ML engineers were going to FB/Google/etc. (and on some rare occasions M$)

> and on some rare occasions M$

Are we still doing that?

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#107

Post by hashhar » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 12:44 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #76

Cyph0n wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, comparing the number of papers is meaningless. A better metric is comparing how many significant advances resulted from research funded by the company. Using the second metric, the winner in all cases - without negotiation - would be AT&T Bell Labs.

Perhaps we could develop an algorithm that uses the number of citations from other papers to rank the importance of each paper, a "PageRank" if you will.

Funny how I'm working on exactly that for my major project in Bachelors next semester. I don't have it figured out but it's a problem I'd like to solve.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#108

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 12:46 PM UTC

aylons wrote: post #46

serge2k wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the transistor is more groundbreaking than anything xerox did.

The transistor is more groundbreaking than most developments in the 20th century, combined.

More groundbreaking than other developments singly - probabably; combined? not a chance. Other 20th century developments include flight, rocketry, the United Nations, quantum physics, splitting the atom, the M.A.D. principle, assembly line production, robotics, analog computers (including those used for AA targeting systems in WWII, predating the transistor), among many, many others.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#109

Post by pinouchon » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

deepnotderp wrote: post #66

Just goes to show you the market power of ml researchers, even apple has to bend the knee.

I completely agree. But still I find it surprising that apple managed to hire Salakhutdinov. He is a huge name in Deep Learning (with a focus on math, unsupervised learning and autoencoders)

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#110

Post by ZenoArrow » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #104

ZenoArrow wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it." I'd suggest that was due to the anti-trust case against Bell more than anything else. For example, I believe AT&T were forbidden from selling Unix direct to consumers for many years, leading them to licence Unix to other entities (in the business and academic worlds).

Which is why UNIX got widespread in first place. I very much doubt it would have been adopted in such scale, specially for the then startups trying to start a workstation market, if Bell could sell it at the same prices other OSes were being sold.

Possibly, possibly not. Consider the competition Unix had at the time it was released. A cut down version could've also made inroads into the desktop market (for business users).