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.
How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if people Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position ( generally satisfied iphone owner ). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not…
Vigorous discussion isn't an unqualified good. If it goes somewhere, sure. But discussions on HN of Apple's business activities seem rarely at best to do that. I don't understand why the light:heat ratio in this kind of thread is so low, and usually I keep my mouth shut about it, but today the urge to say something overmastered my self-discipline on the matter. I don't pretend that my comments here constitute any mor…
I'd venture that it's probably because Apple don't encourage discussion. As demonstrated in this article and pointed out by other commenters there's a large veil of secrecy that comes down when it comes to detailing specifics, which is all well and good when things are working, but when it isn't what you're faced with is marketing bluster and iron fisted PR. I'll reiterate once more, that for a company that continually touts itself as "top end" just isn't good enough.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This article lacks any real evidence they're ahead though, which is essentially equivalent to "behind" if (a) the majority of the advances are democratized by your competitors and (b) you lack the ability to attract top tier talent. If AI/ML is an existential threat to Apple, then this article doesn't provide any comfort beyond being a PR puff piece. The talent war for AI/ML is truly insane. Given that the top resear…
If what AI/ML talent wants is to do research and draw a Silicon Valley salary then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple.
Some people don't want to work at Apple because they can't describe their job on their LinkedIn pages or tell their friends and family about what they do. Others don't like that they have to buy their own meals at Caffe Macs. I don't think Apple worries about this too much.
What they do worry about is finding people that fit Apple's culture and want to work on products used by hundreds of millions of people.
In any case, being perceived or not to be at the top of the field and being able/unable to hire the best ML/AI talent isn't an existential threat. ML/AI isn't magic, it's a technology. If there's one thing that the tech industry should have learned from Steve Jobs, it's that you make good products by working backward to the technology. In that respect, what Federighi mentioned about not having a ML/AI division was reassuring.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#44siri has gotten worse over time, or at least that's why friends and i have noticed
I haven't noticed anything because the only thing it ever managed to do reliably is set timers so that's all I ever used it for.
and one in 20 times you'll get a "here is the timer" where it just shows you yesterdays already complete dinner timer
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#45Why should Apple researchers contribute back to the AI community on their shareholders' dime? What makes AI special as opposed to any other field of computer science?
The long term goal is loftier than almost all others except for extending human life and populating other star systems.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good comment - a few thoughts: AlphaGo is impressive no doubt but has DeepMind done anything really key to Google's bottom line yet? A lot of the really sweet stuff they do doesn't have immediate commercial utility that I can see. Apple might be waiting to strike once Google has found the killer app (remember they're never really first at anything and focus holistically on the product). Apple is benefiting from other…
DeepMind reduced Google data center cooling bill by 40% in an experiment. If this effect is real, it probably more than justified the $500m tag Google paid to acquire DeepMind. Google might not have come up with a killer app, but perhaps the real killer app is not in the consumer space. https://deepmind.com/blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298
To be fair, the HN discussion was mostly focused on the lack of substantial details or an actual research paper to back up that claim. Google would probably need to show that only DeepMind, or an equivalent device, would have been presently likely to find the energy savings that it ended up finding.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This article lacks any real evidence they're ahead though, which is essentially equivalent to "behind" if (a) the majority of the advances are democratized by your competitors and (b) you lack the ability to attract top tier talent. If AI/ML is an existential threat to Apple, then this article doesn't provide any comfort beyond being a PR puff piece. The talent war for AI/ML is truly insane. Given that the top resear…
I agree with your implicit assumption -- that the talent and PR battle is motivating this article -- but disagree with your assertion that secrecy makes Apple unattractive to ML talent.
You're weighting open publishing very heavily, but others may have different weighting functions. The ability to interact with device makers may be convincing to some, or maybe others like the Apple company and culture, or Apple's privacy stance.
Criticizing the article as PR or boasting is true, but somewhat beside the point, because most of the players in this field have always -- for decades -- had a tendency to PR and boasting. Admittedly, proofs-of-concept like AlphaGo do provide substance behind the boasting, but they have a definite PR element too.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Some companies engage academia, many others do not. I find it very surprising how willing companies like Microsoft and Google are to let their best and brightest invest in publishing. I get the long term benefit, but in most companies secrecy is the default.
To me it's much more surprising that Apple and other companies refuse to allow publishing. Anyone in AI who wants to continue to be recognized in and remain friends with others in the field and advance their career should absolutely refuse to go anywhere like Apple, unless they plan to stay at that one company their entire life. It's amazing how frustrating it is trying to talk to Apple employees at conferences -- at this point I pretty much avoid it if possible.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#49Earlier 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. Under this veil of secrecy and doubletalk, all they have is marketing: Trust the brand rather than objective reality. Many other companies are mature enough to show their cards but Apple keeps declaring victory. Apple writes its own n…
>> "If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims." Why do they need to? At the end of the day all that matters is that the products they ship are good and aren't lacking compared to competitors. The only reason they would provide evidence for what they claim other than that is to appease people calling bullshit and unless it's effecting sales no company should stoop to that.
A lot of their products are lacking though. Maps is awful. So is Safari.
Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
#50i am really disappointed by apple. I respect Apples wish to develop products in secrecy and i understand that you can't just open source your secret sauce. I also really like their products. But not publishing your advancements harms the community greatly. Its like building your product entirely with open-source software (the published work of other researchers) and not contributing back.
That's what they did with osx.
well, i don't think so.
Here is the kernel: http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-3248.60.10/ What's above it is not rocket science and the argument could be made that it would hurt apple open-sourcing it. (Whether it's true or not is irrelevant, it's a valid argument). But this research is not.