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How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

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Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#91

Post by cromwellian »

wodenokoto wrote: post #84
cromwellian wrote: post #81

I realize this is going to get voted down, but piece reads like a Trumpism "we have great AI, trust me, you would not believe, if you could see what we're doing". I don't think you get to claim PR credit for advances in ML unless you publish. In general, for R&D, IMHO, you need to publish. There's product R&D, and there's fundamental R&D. If you make an advancement in something fundamental, but that helps your produc…

> If it is specific to your product only and can't be transferred elsewhere, then maybe it's ok to keep it secret. wouldn't it be the other way around? if the competitors can benefit from your knowledge, you'd want to keep it secret.

No, if everyone can benefit, that, IMHO, is precisely why it should be contributed back to the community. If you want a selfish altruistic reason to do it, well the likely improvements that the external community will make will benefit you, including those contributions made by your competitors.

I think a culture of secrecy yields local optima. Only if you believe (and is true) your company has unique geniuses that can't benefit from other people reviewing their science will secrecy benefit you.

IMHO, only research that is useless to your competitors is research to keep secret in the sense that it is too specific to your own proprietary dependencies.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#92

Post by cameldrv »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #32
CogDisco wrote: post #27

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. 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. 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…

They can put out as many PR pieces as they want, but if they want to be judged on their public accomplishments, they're losing. If we're strictly judging UX, in ML areas, they're behind. Google's speech recognition is superior, Google's automated photo organization is superior, and Google Now is superior to Siri.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#93

Post by espadrine »

throwanem wrote: post #12

I like how Apple can't win here. If they publish, they aren't doing anything new and they haven't innovated since Steve died, and they should really just give up because there's obviously no point to anything they do and hasn't been since 1997. If they don't publish, they're evil secretive bastards who don't contribute to the ML community and probably drown puppies or something because who knows what goes on behind c…

> I just think it would be really neat if people would settle on one narrative or the other

Let's start with Apple's narrative. Throughout the piece, there is no direct quote mentioning any Apple innovation. The quotes are actually fairly weak:

“We’ve been seeing over the last five years a growth of this inside Apple”

“I loved [publishing at Microsoft Research] and published many papers. But when Siri came out I said this is a chance to make these deep neural networks all a reality”

“Speech is an excellent example where we applied stuff available externally to get it off the ground.”

What I get from it is that Apple has started following Google's, Microsoft's and Facebook's lead in the past five years, and has a few knowledgeable employees reusing and combining algorithms published in papers from other companies or academia.

But fundamentally, the reason they perform this PR is to start being viewed as knowledgeable in the field, so that when they release self-driving cars in 2017 or 2018, the public trusts them.

And to let us know that they're hiring: “Though today we certainly hire many machine learning people, we also look for people with the right core aptitudes and talents.” The hint is not subtle.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#94

Post by Thlom »

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.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#95

Post by thanatropism »

msoad wrote: post #56

Apple sends their employees to ML/AI conferences with fake company names on their badges to avoid leaking a single bit of their knowledge. I don't know how any AI researcher resists working at Apple!

So - I don't need a source on this to grill you and score internet rhetoric points; I need a source to share this juicy factoid with skeptical friends.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#97

Post by suyash »

LeanderK wrote: post #3

i 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.

This is a free country and capitalist society so Apple has every right to do what they want to do. I don't object to it. What you're saying to Socialist and it has it's plus and minuses.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#98

Post by objclxt »

soperj wrote: post #77
k-mcgrady wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is my browser of choice and I have no issues with it (I much prefer it over Chrome). Maps has occasional issues but it's a solid product now. I use it for walking and transit directions and can't remember the last time I had to fall back on Google Maps.

It's taken me way out of the way, and through a toll bridge when that was not even close to the best way to go. Safari is bad because it's behind the times, and doesn't keep up with standards. Makes it really annoying to have to wait to use certain features because IE and Safari can't keep up.

> Safari is bad because it's behind the times, and doesn't keep up with standards

Safari and WebKit has 100% support for ES6, which is more than any other browser - http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

I think what you mean is Safari doesn't support the standards you want it to support, some of which aren't actually full standards yet but candidates.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#99

Post by eshvk »

sangnoir wrote: post #63
IBM wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Let me simplify that further: "If what AI/ML talent wants is to publish ...then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple". Money may or may not be a factor, but Apples secrecy won't allow the talent to publish their research. Given that AI is highly driven by research right no…

> Given that AI is highly driven by research right now (no "if" about it), what talent would want to work somewhere where they can't publish research papers?

Ehh. I would question that doing research is necessarily highly correlated with wanting to publish papers all the time. A lot of the work during product development is a mix of AI, UX and engineering. The entire output might definitely fall in research but the individual components of it might require way more fleshing out to bring each to publishable quality. Considering that we don't particularly have the publish or perish doctrine of academia, we are not particularly forced to publish at the same rate as there.

Re: How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

#100

Post by [deleted] »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34
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…

> 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. I'm not sure why this is a "big deal" or even much of anything. Apple has always done this. Even their work on WebKit they were not always "there" with the community. This is how Apple has always worked, why would it be any different with AI / ML? > For me, the g…

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