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Apple To Start Publishing AI Research To Hasten Deep Learning (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the opening-to-all dept.

In what is a major deviation in its strategy, Apple will allow its artificial intelligence teams to publish research papers for the first time. From a report on Bloomberg: When Apple introduced its Siri virtual assistant in 2011, the company appeared to have a head start over many of its nearest competitors. But it has lost ground since then to the likes of Alphabet's Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Researchers say among the reasons Apple has failed to keep pace is its unwillingness to allow its AI engineers to publish scientific papers, stymieing its ability to feed off wider advances in the field. That policy has now changed, Russ Salakhutdinov, an Apple director of AI research, said Monday at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona. One attendee posted a photo of a slide from Salakhutdinov's presentation stating "Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes."

2 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Recruiting by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The main reason that Apple is now allowing work to be published is recruitment. In the past, many of the best AI people refused to work for Apple because they couldn't publish their work. Excessive secrecy has a price.

    1. Re:Recruiting by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Smart move from Apple - even if it was to replace a previous dumb move.

      Apple can do fine living in isolation developing hardware enclosures and user interfaces, but the world of AI is much bigger than Apple and it's where the majority of progress in the computing world is going to happen now.

      I'm happy Apple has realised this. Apple vs "the rest of the world" in developing AI was not going to end well for them.

      Well, Apple still has a handicap that's self-imposed - they may be able to do AI research, but they can't get at the data sets they need. Amazon and Google have no problems using information gathered for other purposes in furthering their AI products. Heck, Google even enabled full sharing of information among all of Alphabet's companies so your "OK Google" responses can now include all the webpages you visited with advertising. Or that you blocked DoubleClick's popups.

      Apple prohibits that - information gathered for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose. So if you want to try to use Apple Maps location and search data for Siri, that's not allowed. You have to guess based on the current location of the user, because location searches are not allowed to be part of Siri's data set as they are covered under different privacy policies.

      Apple can try to hire the best, but they'll need to start raping user data if they want to try to catch up with Google.