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Is current profit really the best metric to measure the success of an AI department? I doubt many people bought iPhones because of Siri. AI development's bigges

• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  No it isn't. However profit is the standard by which we measure companies in many cases and so I think it is fair to use it to measure Apple overall. Measuring the impact of the AI group will be harder to do, at the "C" level you evaluate your R&D budget against your ability to stay ahead of your competitors, lower down at the SVP level you're probably balancing near term improvement over game changing innovation. Going further down the the director level you're no doubt measuring your department by its rate of progress against it's own goals, the progress of external organizations with a similar mission. Given the secrecy we can't really know how effective Apple's AI group has been at meeting its goals, nor can we tell how quickly they are moving with respect to the state of the art in the industry. That leaves us with profit from the outside looking in. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that if Google's margins continue to erode over the next five years as they have the previous five, it will will become that much harder to sustain their AI efforts. So at one level company profits can be a way to estimate a company's future ability to compete in the space.