“Lately, we’ve been seeing signs that Apple is starting to loosen up just a teensy bit about its research interests. There were Tim Cook’s extensive interviews with Bloomberg, in which he discussed Apple’s interests in augmented reality and autonomous vehicles,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Now Apple has started a blog to tell the world about its machine learning research, the Apple Machine Learning Journal. But old habits die hard, and Apple chose not to share the names of the authors of the first post on the blog, or even reveal who is editing the blog.”
“However, an enterprising journalist over at Fortune, Jonathan Vanian, pieced together the clues and deduced that the blog piece was, in fact, a rewrite of a research paper that Apple recently made public,” Hibben writes. “The AI blog appears to be the brainchild of Apple’s director of AI research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, who announced the blog via Twitter. Salakhutdinov is also a professor at Carnegie Mellon and has apparently convinced Apple’s management that the best research doesn’t occur in a vacuum of secrecy.”
“This is a very important lesson, even if incompletely learned,” Hibben writes. “Now if Apple will only publish the names of the authors and its blog editors, it would be off to a great start.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Baby steps. Secrecy is deeply ingrained at Apple.
Also, as we wrote back in March, “Apple, due to secrecy, is farther along in AI than most observers realize.”
We’ve been seeing over the last five years a growth of this inside Apple. Our devices are getting so much smarter at a quicker rate, especially with our Apple design A series chips. The back ends are getting so much smarter, faster, and everything we do finds some reason to be connected. This enables more and more machine learning techniques, because there is so much stuff to learn, and it’s available to [us]… We use these techniques to do the things we have always wanted to do, better than we’ve been able to do. And on new things we haven’t be able to do. It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things as it evolves inside Apple and in the ways we make products… Machine learning is enabling us to say yes to some things that in past years we would have said no to. It’s becoming embedded in the process of deciding the products we’re going to do next. — Phil Schiller, August 2016
SEE ALSO:
Apple launches new Machine Learning website – July 19, 2017
Apple’s Artificial Intelligence Director discusses computers that can remember – March 29, 2017
New hire could be critical step toward attracting high-profile AI research talent to Apple – October 18, 2016
Apple hires a big brain in AI to smarten up Siri – October 17, 2016
Apple transforms Turi into dedicated machine learning division to build future product features – August 31, 2016
An exclusive inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple – August 24, 2016
Apple rumored to be taking big piece of Seattle-area office market in expansion – August 12, 2016
Why Apple will become a leader in artificial intelligence – August 8, 2016
Apple buys machine-learning startup Turi for $200 million – August 6, 2016
Apple touts Artificial Intelligence in iOS and opens ‘crown jewels’ to developers – June 14, 2016
Smartphones to die out within five years, replaced by artificial intelligence – survey – December 9, 2015
Apple’s extreme secrecy retarding its artificial intelligence work – October 30, 2015
Apple hires NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence director – October 24, 2015
Apple acquires advanced artificial intelligence startup Perceptio – October 5, 2015
Apple buys artificial intelligence natural language start-up VocalIQ – October 2, 2015
