Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#101

Post by nagVenkat » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 8:59 AM UTC

zuppy wrote: post #95

abalone wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is totally unfounded. Their market-leading bokeh camera effect is powered by a “state of the art image recognition system” including custom silicon (the “neural engine”). Siri has gotten a lot better especially at natural language recognition.[1] The HomePod for example is exceptionally good at detecting Hey Siri commands while loud music is playing. That’s all local machine learning processing coupled with a gr…

I keep hearing that people noticed Siri getting better, but my experience is totaly different. For example, how can it screw up something as simple as enabling alarms: https://ibb.co/vkYpGcq (this has happened multiple times to me). Why most of the questions are answered with a google search link? Why it keeps randomly forgetting context (example: I tell her to wake me up at 1pm, then repeat just 1:01pm, and so on to…

I complained a few months ago that Siri had a tough time recognizing my accent heavy speech but these days it is better.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#102

Post by ach9l » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:01 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #61

I don't think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands. Or, take a look at Apple Music's recommendation system in comparison to Spotify's discover weekly. Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironic…

The formal grammar structure behind smart assistants is basically the same. Siri is as primitive as Cortana, Google Now and Alexa, the difference comes in the amount of data the interfaces have access too. Outside of the text to speech and speech to text algorithms, there is barely any machine learning when it comes to understanding what the user says. As of it right now comparing smart assistants is equivalent to comparing dictionaries, Siri having less entries and people writing them than the others.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#103

Post by setquk » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:01 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #77

reindeerer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very much a focus and resource allocation problem. Double the number of engineers working on the keyboard and it doesn't happen

I can almost guarantee that doubling the number of engineers working on the keyboard would make the problem worse, rather than better.

Replacing the current ones would work.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#104

Post by JimDabell » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:04 AM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #81

tiew9Vii wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I read Apple are taking a different approach? Google/Amazon are harvesting massive amounts of data and training against it and Apple are taking a privacy first approach saying you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Currently the harvesting data for models look to be working better for Google / Amazon with current technology. The question is how will Apple progress long term and given…

Are you suggesting Apple plans to do AI without harvesting data, or with transparent privacy controls on data? There's literally nothing for machine learning to learn besides harvested data. It's like suggesting that a power company is trying the strategy of using no wires for delivering electricity to houses.. I'd be excited if Apple found a way to trustlessly aggregate data and perform homomorphic training of their…

> There's literally nothing for machine learning to learn besides harvested data.

You can obtain training data from sources other than your customers. Apple have employees driving vans around with cameras and LIDAR.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#105

Post by beambot » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

tiew9Vii wrote: post #73

neya wrote: post #61

I don't think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands. Or, take a look at Apple Music's recommendation system in comparison to Spotify's discover weekly. Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironic…

From what I read Apple are taking a different approach? Google/Amazon are harvesting massive amounts of data and training against it and Apple are taking a privacy first approach saying you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Currently the harvesting data for models look to be working better for Google / Amazon with current technology. The question is how will Apple progress long term and given…

To play devil's advocate: Perhaps Apple adopted this public stance as a strategy to hurt their competitors after failing to achieve parity.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#106

Post by digitalzombie » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

tiew9Vii wrote: post #73

neya wrote: post #61

I don't think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands. Or, take a look at Apple Music's recommendation system in comparison to Spotify's discover weekly. Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironic…

From what I read Apple are taking a different approach? Google/Amazon are harvesting massive amounts of data and training against it and Apple are taking a privacy first approach saying you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Currently the harvesting data for models look to be working better for Google / Amazon with current technology. The question is how will Apple progress long term and given…

You can harvest data and anonymize it. My friend at Google supposedly is doing this via research at Google. I'm not going to say Google care about our privacy as much as Apple but they are researching this probably for medical and for when opportunity arises. To be perfectly honest I think Apple's stance on privacy is all marketing, there are cases where they refused to unlock phones for the FBI but there are other cases where they ship recordings of your talk to SIRI to a third party company.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#107

Post by digitalzombie » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:20 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #80

neya wrote: post #61

I don't think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands. Or, take a look at Apple Music's recommendation system in comparison to Spotify's discover weekly. Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironic…

Apple is far behind its competitors in pretty much every area except hardware. They are still terrible at running stable web services. There is a new critical bug or security hole in their OS every month. And all of their non-hardware offerings - Apple Maps, Apple Music, iCloud, iTunes, Siri etc. - range from very bad to average. IMO they need to be investing a LOT more on the software side of things if they intend t…

Their power cord keep on dying for my macbook 2013.

I had a temp iphone and it took over a lot of my texts by redirecting it toward apple's server first. When I got my android back I receive no text msgs from my friends who have iphone.

It also seem like they're making cheaper stuff so they can increase their margin via tech support and peripherals.

I agree they should invest more in software so they don't have to resort to these crappy tactic.

Also they should make a cheaper iphone region lock it to china and india only if they want to increase their margin. Their current strategy for these markets is stupid.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#108

Post by depr » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

collyw wrote: post #92

nuthje wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major differentiator of Apple hardware is the software that runs on it. iOS and MacOS are basically unmatched by other offerings.

In what meaningful way are they "unmatched"?

iPhones have better hardware/software integration, which is easy for Apple to do because they control everything. They get better performance out of their hardware because of this.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#109

Post by itslennysfault » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #30

pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

“can’t make” - that is a very general statement. I am quite happy with my MBP

Post 2015? Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I can't type on them to save my life.

I had a 2006 MBP and every 3 - 5 years since, but after a few months with the latest line I jumped to a Dell XPS running Ubuntu, and I never looked back. Had to find new tools and learn new shortcuts, but after a month or so I adjusted, and I never have to endure that hellish keyboard again.

edit: punctuation exists.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#110

Post by stealthcat » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

leesec wrote: post #9

pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

Apple has 250 billion dollars at their disposal. They can obviously have multiple efforts running in parallel.

Can't do much with anti-trust law around.

In 18th-century, "trade companies" (V.O.C., British East India Company, etc.) are strong enough to own a country.