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How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple

328 points by firloop 10y ago

vonnik 10y ago
I have a big problem with articles like this. Apple's PR is notorious for cracking the whip, which means that the "inside story", if they give it to you, comes with a warning to the journalist to behave and be nice. Levy's piece is generous with flattery and cautious with criticism. He quotes Kaplan and Etzioni high and briefly in the piece, and spends the rest of it refuting them. Apple will give him another inside story down the road. Apple has a big question to resolve for itself about the tools it's going to use to develop this. It can't go with Tensorflow, because TF is from Google. It's kind of at another turning point, like the one in the early 90s when it needed it's own operating system and Jobs convinced them to buy next and use what would become OSX.[0] The most pointed question to ask is: What are they doing that's new? The use cases in the Levy story are neat, and I'm sure Apple is executing well, but they don't take my breath away. None of those applications make me think Apple is actually on the cutting edge. There's no mention of reinforcement learning, for example; there is no AlphaGo moment so far where the discipline leaps 10 years ahead. And the deeper question is: Is Apple's AI campaign impelled by the same vision that clearly drives Demis Hassabis and Larry Page? We see what's new at Google by reading DeepMind and Google Brain papers. Everyone else is letting their AI people publish, which is a huge recruiting draw and leads to stronger teams. Who, among the top researchers, has joined Apple? Did they do it secretly? (This is plausible, and if someone knows the answer, please say...) The Turi team is strong, yes, but can they match DeepMind? If Apple hasn't built that team yet, what are they doing to change their approach? Another key distinction between Apple and Google, which Levy points out, is their approach to data. Google crowdsources the gathering of data and sells it to advertisers; Apple is so strict about privacy that it doesn't even let itself see your data, let alone anyone else. I support Apple's stance, but I worry that this will have repercussions on the size and accuracy of the models it is able to build. > “We keep some of the most sensitive things where the ML is occurring entirely local to the device,” Federighi says. Apple says it's keeping the important data, and therefore the processing of that data, on the phone. Great, but you need many GPUs to train a large model in a reasonable amount of time, and you simply can't do that on a phone. Not yet. It's done in the cloud and on proprietary racks. So when he says they're keeping it on the phone, does he mean that some other encrypted form of it is shared on the cloud using differential privacy? Curious... > "How big is this brain, the dynamic cache that enables machine learning on the iPhone? Somewhat to my surprise when I asked Apple, it provided the information: about 200 megabytes.." Google's building models with billions of parameters that require much more than 200MB, and that are really, really good at scoring data. I have to believe either that a) Apple is not telling us everything, or b) they haven't figured out a way to bring their customers the most powerful AI yet. (And the answer could very well be c) that I don't understand what's going on...) [0] If they have a JVM stack, they should consider ours: http://deeplearning4j.org/ http://deeplearning4j.org/
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "Apple is so strict about privacy that it doesn't even let itself see your data, let alone anyone else. I support Apple's stance, but I worry that this will have repercussions on the size and accuracy of the models it is able to build." I don't think this is something we should worry about. If you want better models use Google. If you want better privacy go with Apple. It's fantastic that we actually have a choice and don't all have to sign our privacy away or live in the dark ages.
- c0g 10y ago
  Good comment - a few thoughts: AlphaGo is impressive no doubt but has DeepMind done anything really key to Google's bottom line yet? A lot of the really sweet stuff they do doesn't have immediate commercial utility that I can see. Apple might be waiting to strike once Google has found the killer app (remember they're never really first at anything and focus holistically on the product). Apple is benefiting from other companies releasing their research. If everyone but Apple releases the community is nearly as good, and Apple gets the pick of external and internal research while not needing to give up any of their own ideas. I know they send people to conferences and it can be a bit weird talking to someone who won't tell you anything about what they do. Regarding researchers, I don't know of any top trend setters who've joined but they do have some very good applied ML people through direct- or aqui-hires. Tl;dr: Apple doing what they usually do and keeping their powder dry/free loading off other's work until they can execute the product.
  - davidcgl 10y ago
    DeepMind reduced Google data center cooling bill by 40% in an experiment. If this effect is real, it probably more than justified the $500m tag Google paid to acquire DeepMind. Google might not have come up with a killer app, but perhaps the real killer app is not in the consumer space. https://deepmind.com/blog https://deepmind.com/blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298
    - c0g 10y ago
      Taking that at face value that's amazing.
dstaten 10y ago
siri has gotten worse over time, or at least that's why friends and i have noticed
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  I've noticed it get drastically better. I never used to be able to use it at all. It was just a pointless exercise. Now it works for everything I use it for, which isn't a lot, but I don't get any issues.
- theinternetman 10y ago
  I haven't noticed anything because the only thing it ever managed to do reliably is set timers so that's all I ever used it for. and one in 20 times you'll get a "here is the timer" where it just shows you yesterdays already complete dinner timer
- gpmcadam 10y ago
  Siri is now a term used by Apple to cover many virtual assistant applications, not just the conversational side of things. The article goes in depth about things such as Siri Suggestions and pro-active notifications based on patterns and context.
throwanem 10y ago
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 closed doors? I don't really have a dog in this fight, except inasmuch as I'm a generally satisfied iPhone owner. I just think it would be really neat if people would settle on one narrative or the other, instead of keeping on with both at once.
- ricksplat 10y ago
  > if people Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position (generally satisfied iphone owner). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not everybody is satisfied with "good enough" isn't a reason to silence discussion. Particularly when as a brand they're pitched as high end rather than just good enough.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Vigorous discussion isn't an unqualified good. If it goes somewhere, sure. But discussions on HN of Apple's business activities seem rarely at best to do that. I don't understand why the light:heat ratio in this kind of thread is so low, and usually I keep my mouth shut about it, but today the urge to say something overmastered my self-discipline on the matter. I don't pretend that my comments here constitute any more of a contribution to worthwhile discourse than anyone else's do.
    - ricksplat 10y ago
      I'd venture that it's probably because Apple don't encourage discussion. As demonstrated in this article and pointed out by other commenters there's a large veil of secrecy that comes down when it comes to detailing specifics, which is all well and good when things are working, but when it isn't what you're faced with is marketing bluster and iron fisted PR. I'll reiterate once more, that for a company that continually touts itself as "top end" just isn't good enough.
mikesf888 10y ago
IMO the most profound quote in the interview: “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi.
emehrkay 10y ago
Off topic a bit, but this article makes me wonder where does one start with Deep/Machine Learning/AI? I've seen a few posts the past few days talking about the topic (Deep Learning with Python, etc.), but what are the core requirements regarding math, statistics, programming, etc? Where should a web developer start?
- starchild3001 10y ago
  Check out the stanfard MOOC class taught by Andrew Ng... that's where most people (I know of) started. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Andrew+Ng+machine+learning&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Andrew+... Web developer to ML? Doable but you may have to work harder than some other folks have a background in statistics, probability, signal processing etc. Plus, you don't have to be an algorithms developer... doing the backend, compute cluster is hugely valuable, too.
  - emehrkay 10y ago
    Thank you, I actually just found him on Coursera(https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) before your reply. I will definitely check it out. I don't think that I want to make the switch, just know what is what and dabble a little bit.
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
Why should Apple researchers contribute back to the AI community on their shareholders' dime? What makes AI special as opposed to any other field of computer science?
- oblio 10y ago
  The long term goal is loftier than almost all others except for extending human life and populating other star systems.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    That's an opinion. I don't think you could get a random group of 3 AI researchers to agree on what the long term goal is, or if there even is a long term goal as opposed to this simply being a very buzzword- and marketing-friendly area of research at the moment.
Smerity 10y ago
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 whether they're from industry or academia. Employees from competing companies will meet at a conference and actually discuss methods. Papers are released to disseminate new ideas and as a way of attracting top tier talent. Code is released as a way of pretraining students in the company's stack before they ever step through the company's doors. Papers are published on arXiv when the authors feel they're ready - entirely free to access - without waiting for a conference for their ideas to be spread. This entire push of camaraderie has accelerated the speed at which research and implementation have progressed for AI/ML. ... but Apple are not part of that. They publish little and more broadly don't have a good track record. On acquiring FoundationDB, they nixed it, with little respect to the existing customers. Fascinating pieces of technology lost. If they aren't using the exact thing internally, why not open source it? I fear the same is likely to happen to Turi, especially sad given the number of customers they had and the previous contributions that many of Turi's researchers made to the community via their published papers. Apple may change in the future - they may become part of the community - but a vague article of self congratulation isn't going to sway me either direction. "We have the biggest and baddest GPU farm cranking all the time" ... Really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- IBM 10y ago
  What makes you think this is self-congratulation? This is a response to Marco Arment, Ben Thompson, and other pundits (largely spurred by the PR efforts of Google and to a lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft) who claim that Apple is "behind" in this field or that it somehow poses an existential threat to Apple. This is Apple saying "uh no". They'd be perfectly fine with not talking about it as they've done until now if they weren't trying to counter these media narratives. As to your point about Apple not engaging with the research community, how is this a surprise at all? Their M.O has been secrecy ever since Jobs returned to Apple.
  - 10y ago
LeanderK 10y ago
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.
- soperj 10y ago
  That's what they did with osx.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    OSX is much more than the kernel. Darwin is open source, even. What are you talking about?
    - leereeves 10y ago
      How much of Apple's investment in OS X was in Darwin, and how much was in proprietary technology? Apple built a proprietary product using open source technology, and are now building proprietary products using open ML research. But it seems they're doing so for their own profit, not to benefit the open source and research communities.
      - deleted 10y ago
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      - coldtea 10y ago
        >Apple built a proprietary product using open source technology You say it as its somehow contradictory. Open Source licences allow (LGPL etc), and some even welcome (BSD, MIT, Apache) creating proprietary software based on open source technologies. Besides, Apple also did extend open source technologies (as open source) a hell of a lot. Webkit past Apple is 100x bigger/fancier/better than the puny KHTML it started from. Tons of LLVM work, especially all the early stuff, has been sponsored by Apple. Swift was made Open Source just recently...
theinternetman 10y ago
Finding these heavily curated advertorials Apple has been pushing out (This and the recent wired advertorials come to mind) a bit of a sign that not everything is sunny at One Infinite Loop.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Probably no more so than Google. Steven Levy is basically the go-to when you want this sort of stuff. For example, https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-machine-learning-first-company-ada63defcb70#.3gjh9zpy1 https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-m...
msoad 10y ago
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!
- thanatropism 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
devy 10y ago
There are a lot of criticisms here about Apple's secretive AI/ML development practices. But it's not unusual to Apple's long culture heritage of secrecy. From consumer's perspective, I applaud their firm believe of customer privacy as well as pioneering consumer products based on AI/ML development AND with differential privacy in mind.[1][2] [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/6/20/the-technology-behind-apple-photos-and-the-future-of-deep-le.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/6/20/the-technology-beh... [2] http://www.imore.com/our-full-transcript-talk-show-wwdc-2016-phil-schiller-and-craig-federighi http://www.imore.com/our-full-transcript-talk-show-wwdc-2016...
tahoeskibum 10y ago
Nice article, but in my perception, Apple is way behind in AI vs. Google on mobile. Siri's current speech recognition is still far behind Google on my iPhone. Half of the time it Siri doesn't recognize something but Google recognizes it right way. Apple Maps continues to lag in the following features: biking and public transit and even things like which lane to take on a big interchange. As a result I end up using Google (Now) and Google Maps by default.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Never mind biking. For example in Switzerland Apple Maps doesn't even seem to take traffic information into account when it gives you ETAs. It shows heavy traffic as red spots, but it doesn't know the delay. Google meanwhile gets all of this perfectly.
cromwellian 10y ago
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 product, then publish it. If it is specific to your product only and can't be transferred elsewhere, then maybe it's ok to keep it secret. Apple and Google's competitive advantage now arises from scale and path dependency. I think they need to let go of this idea that somehow they derive a competitive advantage by keeping these things secret. The Open AI community is going to advance at an accelerated rate regardless and IMHO, it's better to be part of it than to be seen as a kind of parasite that consumes public R&D, but doesn't give back improvements.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > 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.
  - cromwellian 10y ago
    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.
vthallam 10y ago
> If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve come across Apple’s AI, and not just in Siri’s improved acumen in figuring out what you ask of her. 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 the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to. These are all techniques either made possible or greatly enhanced by Apple’s adoption of deep learning and neural nets. This whole paragraph must be a joke. Google started doing this since way too long and they don't even publish these as their best features.
caycep 10y ago
They were certainly at NIPS. I got a nice Apple pen and ski hat...
soared 10y ago
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 the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to
- astrange 10y ago
  > shut off most of the siri/recommended apps/etc functions in favor of serious battery life gains? That won't get you any battery life. Just use low power mode and turn down the backlight if you need more.
- Thlom 10y ago
  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.
  - laichzeit0 10y ago
    So glad I'm not the only one. How do you turn this crap off?
    - Thlom 10y ago
      It will take 524 minutes to drive to work. Traffic is normal.
quattrofan 10y ago
THis feels so much like a story done as a marketing/PR angle
castell 10y ago
Is there a way to op-out of this on iOS and macOS? That's really scary. ML and AI on OS-level should run decentral on the device itself, and don't leak data at all. The spirit of the 1990s was that way, and we older desktop software works fine that way (even on Pentium 1 hardware), so it would run like a piece of cake on a modern smartphone. The "differential privacy" technology may sound good, but without an independent audit who knows how good it works.
plg 10y ago
has anyone considered the possibility that perhaps Apple has made a judgement that the recent resurgence in AI/ML is, (like all of them before, over the past 50 years) overblown, and Apple would rather spend their time and resources on other things? There's no doubt that the recent advances in deep learning have improved ML/AI in certain specific domains ... but it seems like every 15-20 years or so we see an advance and an accompanying narrative that "AI is back! fully automated future is near!"... which fizzles out, again Also, Apple has a more humanist tradition than Google, FB, etc, and it's my impression that they value the human element perhaps more. Sure, there's Siri, but Siri strikes me more like an ongoing experiment than a fully fledged whole hog "let's put all our eggs in this ML/AI basket"
doe88 10y ago
It isn't clear from the article do they still use Nuance?

328 points by firloop 10y ago

I have a big problem with articles like this. Apple's PR is notorious for cracking the whip, which means that the "inside story", if they give it to you, comes with a warning to the journalist to behave and be nice. Levy's piece is generous with flattery and cautious with criticism. He quotes Kaplan and Etzioni high and briefly in the piece, and spends the rest of it refuting them. Apple will give him another inside story down the road. Apple has a big question to resolve for itself about the tools it's going to use to develop this. It can't go with Tensorflow, because TF is from Google. It's kind of at another turning point, like the one in the early 90s when it needed it's own operating system and Jobs convinced them to buy next and use what would become OSX.[0] The most pointed question to ask is: What are they doing that's new? The use cases in the Levy story are neat, and I'm sure Apple is executing well, but they don't take my breath away. None of those applications make me think Apple is actually on the cutting edge. There's no mention of reinforcement learning, for example; there is no AlphaGo moment so far where the discipline leaps 10 years ahead. And the deeper question is: Is Apple's AI campaign impelled by the same vision that clearly drives Demis Hassabis and Larry Page? We see what's new at Google by reading DeepMind and Google Brain papers. Everyone else is letting their AI people publish, which is a huge recruiting draw and leads to stronger teams. Who, among the top researchers, has joined Apple? Did they do it secretly? (This is plausible, and if someone knows the answer, please say...) The Turi team is strong, yes, but can they match DeepMind? If Apple hasn't built that team yet, what are they doing to change their approach? Another key distinction between Apple and Google, which Levy points out, is their approach to data. Google crowdsources the gathering of data and sells it to advertisers; Apple is so strict about privacy that it doesn't even let itself see your data, let alone anyone else. I support Apple's stance, but I worry that this will have repercussions on the size and accuracy of the models it is able to build. > “We keep some of the most sensitive things where the ML is occurring entirely local to the device,” Federighi says. Apple says it's keeping the important data, and therefore the processing of that data, on the phone. Great, but you need many GPUs to train a large model in a reasonable amount of time, and you simply can't do that on a phone. Not yet. It's done in the cloud and on proprietary racks. So when he says they're keeping it on the phone, does he mean that some other encrypted form of it is shared on the cloud using differential privacy? Curious... > "How big is this brain, the dynamic cache that enables machine learning on the iPhone? Somewhat to my surprise when I asked Apple, it provided the information: about 200 megabytes.." Google's building models with billions of parameters that require much more than 200MB, and that are really, really good at scoring data. I have to believe either that a) Apple is not telling us everything, or b) they haven't figured out a way to bring their customers the most powerful AI yet. (And the answer could very well be c) that I don't understand what's going on...) [0] If they have a JVM stack, they should consider ours: http://deeplearning4j.org/ http://deeplearning4j.org/

k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "Apple is so strict about privacy that it doesn't even let itself see your data, let alone anyone else. I support Apple's stance, but I worry that this will have repercussions on the size and accuracy of the models it is able to build." I don't think this is something we should worry about. If you want better models use Google. If you want better privacy go with Apple. It's fantastic that we actually have a choice and don't all have to sign our privacy away or live in the dark ages.
c0g 10y ago
Good comment - a few thoughts: AlphaGo is impressive no doubt but has DeepMind done anything really key to Google's bottom line yet? A lot of the really sweet stuff they do doesn't have immediate commercial utility that I can see. Apple might be waiting to strike once Google has found the killer app (remember they're never really first at anything and focus holistically on the product). Apple is benefiting from other companies releasing their research. If everyone but Apple releases the community is nearly as good, and Apple gets the pick of external and internal research while not needing to give up any of their own ideas. I know they send people to conferences and it can be a bit weird talking to someone who won't tell you anything about what they do. Regarding researchers, I don't know of any top trend setters who've joined but they do have some very good applied ML people through direct- or aqui-hires. Tl;dr: Apple doing what they usually do and keeping their powder dry/free loading off other's work until they can execute the product.
- davidcgl 10y ago
  DeepMind reduced Google data center cooling bill by 40% in an experiment. If this effect is real, it probably more than justified the $500m tag Google paid to acquire DeepMind. Google might not have come up with a killer app, but perhaps the real killer app is not in the consumer space. https://deepmind.com/blog https://deepmind.com/blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298
  - c0g 10y ago
    Taking that at face value that's amazing.

dstaten 10y ago

siri has gotten worse over time, or at least that's why friends and i have noticed

k-mcgrady 10y ago
I've noticed it get drastically better. I never used to be able to use it at all. It was just a pointless exercise. Now it works for everything I use it for, which isn't a lot, but I don't get any issues.
theinternetman 10y ago
I haven't noticed anything because the only thing it ever managed to do reliably is set timers so that's all I ever used it for. and one in 20 times you'll get a "here is the timer" where it just shows you yesterdays already complete dinner timer
gpmcadam 10y ago
Siri is now a term used by Apple to cover many virtual assistant applications, not just the conversational side of things. The article goes in depth about things such as Siri Suggestions and pro-active notifications based on patterns and context.

throwanem 10y ago

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 closed doors? I don't really have a dog in this fight, except inasmuch as I'm a generally satisfied iPhone owner. I just think it would be really neat if people would settle on one narrative or the other, instead of keeping on with both at once.

ricksplat 10y ago
> if people Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position (generally satisfied iphone owner). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not everybody is satisfied with "good enough" isn't a reason to silence discussion. Particularly when as a brand they're pitched as high end rather than just good enough.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Vigorous discussion isn't an unqualified good. If it goes somewhere, sure. But discussions on HN of Apple's business activities seem rarely at best to do that. I don't understand why the light:heat ratio in this kind of thread is so low, and usually I keep my mouth shut about it, but today the urge to say something overmastered my self-discipline on the matter. I don't pretend that my comments here constitute any more of a contribution to worthwhile discourse than anyone else's do.
  - ricksplat 10y ago
    I'd venture that it's probably because Apple don't encourage discussion. As demonstrated in this article and pointed out by other commenters there's a large veil of secrecy that comes down when it comes to detailing specifics, which is all well and good when things are working, but when it isn't what you're faced with is marketing bluster and iron fisted PR. I'll reiterate once more, that for a company that continually touts itself as "top end" just isn't good enough.

mikesf888 10y ago

IMO the most profound quote in the interview: “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi.

emehrkay 10y ago

Off topic a bit, but this article makes me wonder where does one start with Deep/Machine Learning/AI? I've seen a few posts the past few days talking about the topic (Deep Learning with Python, etc.), but what are the core requirements regarding math, statistics, programming, etc? Where should a web developer start?

starchild3001 10y ago
Check out the stanfard MOOC class taught by Andrew Ng... that's where most people (I know of) started. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Andrew+Ng+machine+learning&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Andrew+... Web developer to ML? Doable but you may have to work harder than some other folks have a background in statistics, probability, signal processing etc. Plus, you don't have to be an algorithms developer... doing the backend, compute cluster is hugely valuable, too.
- emehrkay 10y ago
  Thank you, I actually just found him on Coursera(https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) before your reply. I will definitely check it out. I don't think that I want to make the switch, just know what is what and dabble a little bit.

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

Why should Apple researchers contribute back to the AI community on their shareholders' dime? What makes AI special as opposed to any other field of computer science?

oblio 10y ago
The long term goal is loftier than almost all others except for extending human life and populating other star systems.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  That's an opinion. I don't think you could get a random group of 3 AI researchers to agree on what the long term goal is, or if there even is a long term goal as opposed to this simply being a very buzzword- and marketing-friendly area of research at the moment.

Smerity 10y ago

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 whether they're from industry or academia. Employees from competing companies will meet at a conference and actually discuss methods. Papers are released to disseminate new ideas and as a way of attracting top tier talent. Code is released as a way of pretraining students in the company's stack before they ever step through the company's doors. Papers are published on arXiv when the authors feel they're ready - entirely free to access - without waiting for a conference for their ideas to be spread. This entire push of camaraderie has accelerated the speed at which research and implementation have progressed for AI/ML. ... but Apple are not part of that. They publish little and more broadly don't have a good track record. On acquiring FoundationDB, they nixed it, with little respect to the existing customers. Fascinating pieces of technology lost. If they aren't using the exact thing internally, why not open source it? I fear the same is likely to happen to Turi, especially sad given the number of customers they had and the previous contributions that many of Turi's researchers made to the community via their published papers. Apple may change in the future - they may become part of the community - but a vague article of self congratulation isn't going to sway me either direction. "We have the biggest and baddest GPU farm cranking all the time" ... Really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IBM 10y ago
What makes you think this is self-congratulation? This is a response to Marco Arment, Ben Thompson, and other pundits (largely spurred by the PR efforts of Google and to a lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft) who claim that Apple is "behind" in this field or that it somehow poses an existential threat to Apple. This is Apple saying "uh no". They'd be perfectly fine with not talking about it as they've done until now if they weren't trying to counter these media narratives. As to your point about Apple not engaging with the research community, how is this a surprise at all? Their M.O has been secrecy ever since Jobs returned to Apple.
- 10y ago

LeanderK 10y ago

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.

soperj 10y ago
That's what they did with osx.
- posterboy 10y ago
  OSX is much more than the kernel. Darwin is open source, even. What are you talking about?
  - leereeves 10y ago
    How much of Apple's investment in OS X was in Darwin, and how much was in proprietary technology? Apple built a proprietary product using open source technology, and are now building proprietary products using open ML research. But it seems they're doing so for their own profit, not to benefit the open source and research communities.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Apple built a proprietary product using open source technology You say it as its somehow contradictory. Open Source licences allow (LGPL etc), and some even welcome (BSD, MIT, Apache) creating proprietary software based on open source technologies. Besides, Apple also did extend open source technologies (as open source) a hell of a lot. Webkit past Apple is 100x bigger/fancier/better than the puny KHTML it started from. Tons of LLVM work, especially all the early stuff, has been sponsored by Apple. Swift was made Open Source just recently...

theinternetman 10y ago

Finding these heavily curated advertorials Apple has been pushing out (This and the recent wired advertorials come to mind) a bit of a sign that not everything is sunny at One Infinite Loop.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Probably no more so than Google. Steven Levy is basically the go-to when you want this sort of stuff. For example, https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-machine-learning-first-company-ada63defcb70#.3gjh9zpy1 https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-m...

msoad 10y ago

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!

thanatropism 10y ago
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.
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devy 10y ago

There are a lot of criticisms here about Apple's secretive AI/ML development practices. But it's not unusual to Apple's long culture heritage of secrecy. From consumer's perspective, I applaud their firm believe of customer privacy as well as pioneering consumer products based on AI/ML development AND with differential privacy in mind.[1][2] [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/6/20/the-technology-behind-apple-photos-and-the-future-of-deep-le.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/6/20/the-technology-beh... [2] http://www.imore.com/our-full-transcript-talk-show-wwdc-2016-phil-schiller-and-craig-federighi http://www.imore.com/our-full-transcript-talk-show-wwdc-2016...

tahoeskibum 10y ago

Nice article, but in my perception, Apple is way behind in AI vs. Google on mobile. Siri's current speech recognition is still far behind Google on my iPhone. Half of the time it Siri doesn't recognize something but Google recognizes it right way. Apple Maps continues to lag in the following features: biking and public transit and even things like which lane to take on a big interchange. As a result I end up using Google (Now) and Google Maps by default.

m_mueller 10y ago
Never mind biking. For example in Switzerland Apple Maps doesn't even seem to take traffic information into account when it gives you ETAs. It shows heavy traffic as red spots, but it doesn't know the delay. Google meanwhile gets all of this perfectly.

cromwellian 10y ago

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 product, then publish it. If it is specific to your product only and can't be transferred elsewhere, then maybe it's ok to keep it secret. Apple and Google's competitive advantage now arises from scale and path dependency. I think they need to let go of this idea that somehow they derive a competitive advantage by keeping these things secret. The Open AI community is going to advance at an accelerated rate regardless and IMHO, it's better to be part of it than to be seen as a kind of parasite that consumes public R&D, but doesn't give back improvements.

wodenokoto 10y ago
> 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.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  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.

vthallam 10y ago

> If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve come across Apple’s AI, and not just in Siri’s improved acumen in figuring out what you ask of her. 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 the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to. These are all techniques either made possible or greatly enhanced by Apple’s adoption of deep learning and neural nets. This whole paragraph must be a joke. Google started doing this since way too long and they don't even publish these as their best features.

caycep 10y ago

They were certainly at NIPS. I got a nice Apple pen and ski hat...

soared 10y ago

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 the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to

astrange 10y ago
> shut off most of the siri/recommended apps/etc functions in favor of serious battery life gains? That won't get you any battery life. Just use low power mode and turn down the backlight if you need more.
Thlom 10y ago
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.
- laichzeit0 10y ago
  So glad I'm not the only one. How do you turn this crap off?
  - Thlom 10y ago
    It will take 524 minutes to drive to work. Traffic is normal.

quattrofan 10y ago

THis feels so much like a story done as a marketing/PR angle

castell 10y ago

Is there a way to op-out of this on iOS and macOS? That's really scary. ML and AI on OS-level should run decentral on the device itself, and don't leak data at all. The spirit of the 1990s was that way, and we older desktop software works fine that way (even on Pentium 1 hardware), so it would run like a piece of cake on a modern smartphone. The "differential privacy" technology may sound good, but without an independent audit who knows how good it works.

plg 10y ago

has anyone considered the possibility that perhaps Apple has made a judgement that the recent resurgence in AI/ML is, (like all of them before, over the past 50 years) overblown, and Apple would rather spend their time and resources on other things? There's no doubt that the recent advances in deep learning have improved ML/AI in certain specific domains ... but it seems like every 15-20 years or so we see an advance and an accompanying narrative that "AI is back! fully automated future is near!"... which fizzles out, again Also, Apple has a more humanist tradition than Google, FB, etc, and it's my impression that they value the human element perhaps more. Sure, there's Siri, but Siri strikes me more like an ongoing experiment than a fully fledged whole hog "let's put all our eggs in this ML/AI basket"

doe88 10y ago

It isn't clear from the article do they still use Nuance?