Modern AI research heavily depends on building work of others as well as having others build on your work. It's this virtuous cycle that is bringing all the adv

Modern AI research heavily depends on building work of others as well as having others build on your work. It's this virtuous cycle that is bringing all the advances we are seeing. Let's say someone at Apple had invented recurrent networks but they never published it. That would mean they would miss out on literally hundreds of researchers working on this, enhancing techniques in very critical ways and writing thousands of papers over the period of just few years that would feed in to this cycle. Many of these papers would contribute absolutely important enhancements to productionize things. Much of the AI research currently starts with some seed idea like GAN which looks cool in small experiments but have tons of blind spots that needs to iron out. Unlike typical product efforts where you can probably work your way out through brute force engineering, advances in most AI related areas requires massive amount of collaboration, mathematical acrobatics, trial-and-error and cross-pollination across fields consuming multi-person-years before yielding fruits. In theory, Apple can still keep any silver bullets they find in the field secret but in practice such silver bullets are rare and advances are very incremental spanning over many years and many people.