How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#111

Post by vthallam » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 3:39 AM UTC

> If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve come across Apple’s AI, and not just in Siri’s improved acumen in figuring out what you ask of her. You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a shortlist of the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to. These are all techniques either made possible or greatly enhanced by Apple’s adoption of deep learning and neural nets.

This whole paragraph must be a joke. Google started doing this since way too long and they don't even publish these as their best features.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#112

Post by laichzeit0 » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

Thlom wrote: post #94

soared wrote: post #90

I've never had a single one these happen to me. Has anyone actually seen these behaviors out in the wild? Is it because I use gmail, chrome, google maps, and shut off most of the siri/recommended apps/etc functions in favor of serious battery life gains? >You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a shortlist of th…

Nope, but it often tells me how long it will take to drive to work (I never drive to work), even when I'm on the other side of the country, on holiday, and has been for two weeks.

So glad I'm not the only one. How do you turn this crap off?

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#113

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

theinternetman wrote: post #41

Finding these heavily curated advertorials Apple has been pushing out (This and the recent wired advertorials come to mind) a bit of a sign that not everything is sunny at One Infinite Loop.

Probably no more so than Google. Steven Levy is basically the go-to when you want this sort of stuff. For example, https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-m...

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#114

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #8

I have a big problem with articles like this. Apple's PR is notorious for cracking the whip, which means that the "inside story", if they give it to you, comes with a warning to the journalist to behave and be nice. Levy's piece is generous with flattery and cautious with criticism. He quotes Kaplan and Etzioni high and briefly in the piece, and spends the rest of it refuting them. Apple will give him another inside…

Google's way of working with Steven Levy (or The Verge) is no different. You get inside exclusive quotes if you are "nice", you get blacklisted by the company if your article comes off critical.

https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-m...

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#115

Post by bitmapbrother » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 4:25 AM UTC

IBM wrote: post #6

Smerity wrote: post #2

None of this really answers the overlying question that Jerry Kaplan and Oren Etzioni raised. The question raised by most in the field isn't whether Apple use AI/ML internally, the real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly. For me, the greatest thing about the ML/AI community is how open it is and how strong a sense of camaraderie there is between people across the entire field, regardless of…

What makes you think this is self-congratulation? This is a response to Marco Arment, Ben Thompson, and other pundits (largely spurred by the PR efforts of Google and to a lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft) who claim that Apple is "behind" in this field or that it somehow poses an existential threat to Apple. This is Apple saying "uh no". They'd be perfectly fine with not talking about it as they've done until now…

Funny, how it's a "response" from Apple and yet a PR effort from their competitors. FYI, it's a PR effort.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#116

Post by astrange » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 4:27 AM UTC

soared wrote: post #90

I've never had a single one these happen to me. Has anyone actually seen these behaviors out in the wild? Is it because I use gmail, chrome, google maps, and shut off most of the siri/recommended apps/etc functions in favor of serious battery life gains? >You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a shortlist of th…

> shut off most of the siri/recommended apps/etc functions in favor of serious battery life gains?

That won't get you any battery life. Just use low power mode and turn down the backlight if you need more.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#117

Post by brogrammernot » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 4:56 AM UTC

Chronic9q wrote: post #65

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims. Papers, source code, numbers. Not "we have the biggest, baddest GPU farm" and refuse to say any more as policy. But why? Who cares about papers, source code or numbers beyond the tiny segment that HN caters to? Apple has always been about the user experience. When they discuss a vast majority of prior accomplishments they discuss them, many t…

> But why? Who cares about papers, source code or numbers beyond the tiny segment that HN caters to? I don't know, say, the thousands of future engineers and researchers, that, you know, make the product?

N=1, but as an Engineer I don't care about publishing studies, research and whatnot. I care about creating useful/extremely easy to use products that solve real pain points. The lack of AI/ML papers or research posted by Apple doesn't make me think less of applying for them upon finishing my graduate work. They're a great company to work for, and are most assuredly doing some massively cool stuff with their AI/ML development.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#118

Post by caycep » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 5:15 AM UTC

They were certainly at NIPS. I got a nice Apple pen and ski hat...

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#119

Post by jeswin » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #108

Chronic9q wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like Apple there are plenty of companies hard at work on various AI initiatives who are also not going to said events. So what are these companies doing? Linear regression in excel? I don't see any of them beating Go players or building self-driving cars. > Does anyone really care Apple doesn't give away free time / knowledge to people? End users, no. Engineers and researchers, yes. Who builds the products the…

>I don't see any of them beating Go players or building self-driving cars. Because they aren't telling the world. On a lesser scale, CMU was building self driving cars for years before Google decided to step up the PR and tell everyone self driving cars were possible.

There's a big difference between driving in a controlled environment or track versus driving on the street in numbers, where it can pose real danger to people.

Google's self driving cars in one of the most advanced use of technology I've seen. It's borderline magic in our time.

Edit: removed "give credit where it's due". You weren't withholding that, apologies.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#120

Post by dummyacc111 » Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 6:03 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #68

atonse wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure you actually read the article. It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy. And that the fact that they deny AI researchers big hoards of data, hurts their reputation in the AI community, because most AI researchers want mountains of data.

> It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy. My question are: A. who is violating user's privacy, B. How is Apple any different[1] from them, besides proclaiming they aren't violating privacy? 1. Some data is collected from the device and sent to a server for processing. Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is proc…

> Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device)

This is exactly what Apple does, which should answer question B.