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Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

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Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#111

Post by pjmlp »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #110
pjmlp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If it would be priced at the same level of VMS or mainframe OSes, I am not sure.

Plus maybe the Xerox PARC attempts would been more successful if there weren't a cheaper UNIX workstation as alternative, in spite how they managed the whole process.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#112

Post by ClassyJacket »

euyyn wrote: post #38
numbas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Microsoft has been publishing a lot on privacy enhancing Machine Learning too. For instance: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/crypton... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/private... https://youtu.be/xsaXMUelOEA As for Apple: seeing is believing.

And Google started publishing on differential privacy in 2014, way before Apple used WWDC's marketing to paint themselves as the only ones using it.

Can you quote specifically where they said they were the only ones doing it?

I watched that presentation and I don't recall them claiming to be the only ones using differential privacy.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#113

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #87
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.

Xerox failed to profit from them because their management wasn't able to identify the amazing inventions made in their company. It is similar to what they say about Tesla, "when his generation wanted electric toasters, he invented electric cars and wireless electricity"

Xerox failed to profit directly, because the Alto was designed as a hyped-up minicomputer to compete with systems from DEC and IBM - a reasonable choice, because that's what business computing looked like back then.

Xerox didn't lack the commercial understanding to sell Alto+spinoffs, it lacked the understanding to realise you could build a developer ecosystem to support your hardware and make it the de facto standard.

DEC and IBM didn't understand this either. Gates and Jobs totally understood it, which is why Windows became a business standard and the Mac became the only serious business/home alternative.

But Xerox still did okay, because the use of GUI software transformed office culture and made it much more visual - which meant very steady sales of copiers and printers.

Xerox's stock price climbed steadily through the 1990s while paper remained a thing.

After the dot com crash, GUIs and screens had evolved to the point where paper became non-essential, and Xerox never entirely recovered - although you can still find a few people who print out and file all their emails.

tl;dr Xerox did very nicely indeed from Alto etc in an indirect way, for at least a decade or so.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#114

Post by leonroy »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #90
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.

Unfortunately, my prior reply here was flagged, but I'd like to try again. Here's a quote from Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering, less than half a year ago: “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi. https://backchannel.com/an-exclusive-look-a…

> those who...deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing

Interesting quote. Federighi seems a tad condescending - in that producing great products and producing publications are mutually exclusive.

Whilst Apple might expect their engineers to toil away anonymously under NDA without much recognition outside the organization, the world of academic research does not work like that at all.

I guess proof of the pudding is in the eating and in my experience with Apple's AI efforts they are far behind their competitors. I for one am glad Apple are going to start publishing research - it should attract talent, foster sharing and ultimately result in better AI products.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#115

Post by EGreg »

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…

I should admit that after writing this, I went back and forth with him over email and he convinced me he was right, after all.

That continuity assumption he made is there in Newtonian Mechanics and other very widely accepted models. Something just feels off about the whole assumption. maybe I spent too much time with digital computers. Those models have a hard time explaining the non-reversibility of time also.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#116

Post by EGreg »

krenoten wrote: post #103
EGreg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/peopl…

Amazing work :-)

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#117

Post by euyyn »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #112
euyyn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Google started publishing on differential privacy in 2014, way before Apple used WWDC's marketing to paint themselves as the only ones using it.

Can you quote specifically where they said they were the only ones doing it? I watched that presentation and I don't recall them claiming to be the only ones using differential privacy.

Which is why I used "paint", not "said". Not that I expect a company to explicitly say in their big day that others were already doing it, of course.

But my impression from the presentation, as someone who had never heard of differential privacy before, was that this was brand new research from some professor, which they contracted to help them apply it to the real world. Definitely not "this is a technology that's used to achieve such and such, this is how it works".

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#118

Post by ghaff »

deelowe wrote: post #98
ghaff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to romanticize the old Ma Bell especially given the fantastic work done by Bell Labs. I'd also remind you of the cost of a telephone system with monopoly status that didn't even let you install your own phones in the house for a long time. And which led too skits like Lily Tomlin's "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

I can't romanticize about bell labs simply because the rest of the company had shady business practices? Huh?

Bell Labs was able to exist in large part because AT&T was a quasi-government regulated monopoly. You couldn't really have one without the other. (And I'm not sure I'd even say at&t had shady business practices. But they were a de facto monopoly.)

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#119

Post by ZenoArrow »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
ZenoArrow wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If it would be priced at the same level of VMS or mainframe OSes, I am not sure. Plus maybe the Xerox PARC attempts would been more successful if there weren't a cheaper UNIX workstation as alternative, in spite how they managed the whole process.

> "If it would be priced at the same level of VMS or mainframe OSes, I am not sure."

Why would it have needed to be priced that high? We're talking about software here, the cost of reproduction is close to zero. It could've competed in the same market space as CP/M.

Re: Apple to Start Publishing AI Research

#120

Post by hiddencost »

pjmlp wrote: post #105
hiddencost wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# 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…

Google's focus is distributed systems and ML, both of which they're blowing MSR out of the water on.
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