Machine Learning Research at Apple

This is still hugely frustrating to the people working on it. I build high pressure distsys architecture and I've worked on some incredibly cool bleeding edge tech that nobody will ever hear about and I can't even put on my resume because of NDAs. The subject pops up on hn maybe once every 3 months and I'm just dying to talk to other people in that industry but it's just a private group so I enjoy what tidbits I can read, they're always low reply posts, and pay for white papers for most of the rest.

It actually became really important to me over the last 5-10 years. I have no desire to discuss the secret sauce but I've been at companies so secretive that we couldn't even send a github issue up on our personal accounts because some context might bubble up eventually as to what we built and who we are.

I am so, so much happier working on my niche at places where I can interact openly with people from other companies/projects, not in a competitive manner but as engineering peers working to improve some subsystem of our architecture.

I feel like the shift is coming, especially with all of the open standards groups companies are rallying behind. I'm loving that. It's just taking its time to come east of SV.

A big part of maturing as an engineer is realizing that if you’re not talking about something under NDA that’s actually cool, someone else on your team is, and it just makes you worse off.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. Sometimes you’re hired to recruit your friends where you’ll necessarily have to break the NDA to get them excited.

A lot of people look back on R&D work where they did not thrive and quit. I think a big part of it is not realizing what confidentiality really means. They miss out on working with their smart friends, they miss out on getting ideas from other people, they realize there are not enough people they know whom they could trust with confidential stuff. They turn out to be way too square to be doing R&D work, they're hung up on breaking the little rules so how are you going to break the big rules? They're being paid to break rules and they're just afraid to break them. Then when it just comes to doing good work, it’s so important to talk to friends and family for useful feedback especially since you almost always find out from your boss that you’re doing something wrong way too late.

This is especially acute at places like Apple that glorifies confidentiality. They’ve been more successful than ever with their more relaxed attitude towards leaks. It was totally unproductive but it was cargo-culted into places like e.g. Facebook, Snapchat and Samsung that have a hard time recruiting because nobody finds out what they’re going to be working on.

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I don't think that's actually true. Lots of stuff gets published that could (and if the bean counters had their say _would_) be "hidden". But NONE of it is published by commercial labs before all the patents are filed. MS Research cranks out an amazing number of patents. As does Google Brain and Deepmind. Then they have this Mexican standoff and "license" patents to each other.

But _some_ select stuff does not get published. I know of at least two examples first hand: one at MS, one at Google. This is usually the case when publishing a paper would help large, direct competitors to partially or fully close staggering competitive gaps. As you can imagine Google doesn't publish a whole lot on the subject of search ranking, for example.

Yeah but there are also senior people whose heads are so far up their butts. Definitely a situation at Apple that gets cargo-culted elsewhere.

The line they walk is in the service of their own egos. Senior people are rarely in possession of the sort of detailed knowledge that is actual valuable IP to steal - that's like, in the documents and code. They want to get chauffeured in a Bentley. [1] They want everyone to hold their breath when they talk. And by the way, Valleywag turned out to be spot on about how good Tim Cook would be and how bad Johnny Ive has turned, based entirely on their attitudes and not their past performance, which was a serious refutation of the entire way that R&D org was oriented and is reflective of the positive shifts Apple is doing today.

Senior people just have ideas, which honestly anyone can guess that Apple is working on an head mounted display, or that they are experimenting with a Siri that can see through the HMD's camera, working on their own bank, etc. etc. So what is there to keep secret? Google is literally working on everything all the time, even and especially ideas that have failed in the past, so there is literally nothing of value you can learn from "What is Google working on?" So the actual economic value of the head of R&D's secrets is very low, their job is to go and recruit and in that case they should really be talking quite openly about what excites them.

What are the odds any of them are like Shigeru Miyamoto, whose body guards brought around shrouds because last time he turned one of his day to day activities into a video game, it made billions of dollars? Slim. Some VP at Apple is not Shigeru Miyamoto. If you were Shigeru Miyamoto you'd go start your own thing. And that's really what I mean by ego, what 55 year old, at the peak of their seniority and career, is really as great as their paycheck and ego says they are, if they aren't you know, telling their amazing ideas to everyone and recruiting people to do their thing?

[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/apple-design-boss-jon-ive-gets-c...