3 ms·

I'm scratching my head here. Bloomberg casts Apple as the outlier for its secrecy. In reality, companies which publish their results openly are the outliers tod

by shas3 11y ago

I'm scratching my head here. Bloomberg casts Apple as the outlier for its secrecy. In reality, companies which publish their results openly are the outliers today. In the post-golden-era-of-Bell-Labs-and-industrial-research era, publishing is not much of a priority for most companies. Expediting research projects to commercialization leaves little time for going through peer review and publishing. A note on incentives: most companies these days reward R&D employees for commercialization and revenue resulting from their ideas and inventions. Even if they pretend to allow publishing, one can be quite sure that the publications are impacting the careers of authors within the companies in a minimal way, compared to deployments of products and services resulting from their inventions. Apple, Amazon, going one step further from all the old industrial and defense conglomerates, just seems to dispense with the charade about allowing publications. The Amazon example is particularly weird, because what they did (committee approving release, etc.) would be standard practice in most R&D labs, other than the usual exceptions of Microsoft Research, Mitsibushi ERL, etc.

mappingbabeljc 11y ago
Hiya. Author here. I'd class some of Apple's main peers as: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, and, to a lesser extent, Amazon. These are all large consumer technology companies that are trying to develop quite intimate relationships with consumers, whether through phones or services. Among these companies, Apple's secrecy with regards to AI does make it an apparent outlier. All its peers are, to one extent or another, publishing much more aggressively than it in an apparent attempt to woo some of the most accomplished grad students in the academic community into considering going into industry. (Not mentioned in article, but relevant for this: Samsung has started publishing a few papers, and I'm seeing lots of collaboration between Samsung-affiliated researchers and SK academics pop up on Arxiv. Huawei is coming up as well, via its "Noah's Ark Lab" and some other R&D centers.) Tl,dr; most companies are v private and publishing so openly is the outlier, but among Apple's peers/significant competitors, there is a tendency towards open publication and interaction with the academic community.

by shas3 11y ago

mappingbabeljc 11y ago

Hiya. Author here. I'd class some of Apple's main peers as: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, and, to a lesser extent, Amazon. These are all large consumer technology companies that are trying to develop quite intimate relationships with consumers, whether through phones or services. Among these companies, Apple's secrecy with regards to AI does make it an apparent outlier. All its peers are, to one extent or another, publishing much more aggressively than it in an apparent attempt to woo some of the most accomplished grad students in the academic community into considering going into industry. (Not mentioned in article, but relevant for this: Samsung has started publishing a few papers, and I'm seeing lots of collaboration between Samsung-affiliated researchers and SK academics pop up on Arxiv. Huawei is coming up as well, via its "Noah's Ark Lab" and some other R&D centers.) Tl,dr; most companies are v private and publishing so openly is the outlier, but among Apple's peers/significant competitors, there is a tendency towards open publication and interaction with the academic community.