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Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

224 points by ghosh 9y ago

LA_Banker 9y ago
This is interesting because while Apple's (comparative) dedication to privacy is endearing, it's a long-term existential threat. Google knows all about me and its assistant is, usually, great. Amazon has troves of data on what I buy, and I get to yell at Alexa to order more TP as soon as I see we're on the last roll. Apple knows much less about me and, while I'm still an Apple fan and am tied to iPhones/Macs thanks to iMessage, Siri stinks as a result. If voice assistants based on machine learning (specifically, personalized voice assistants) are the next big thing, Apple's privacy ethos will separate it from its major tech competitors – either in a great way, or a very negative way.
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  What can Google do in the cloud that Apple can't do on the device?
  - kingbirdy 9y ago
    Apple can only look at you to learn - Google can look at you, and a million other people like you
    - naravara 9y ago
      I thought Apple figured out a way to create unique IDs and profiles that can't be traced back to the individual person? So they can still find people like you for analytical purposes to tune their models.
    - jug 9y ago
      I think many Apple users would be happy if only Siri could answer factual questions objectively and follow a conversation, being happy with a minimum of privacy collection like current location, name of spouse for messaging, etc. While some may prefer a knowledge about you or you via people like you, as in, "Please recommend me a great movie", Siri is currently not in a stage where she may tell you stuff like "How do I mix a White Russian?" Google Assistant give me 6 steps with a photo and a follow up question "What about Screwdriver?" Siri gets utterly wrecked in the knowledge based questions. I think the main problem is not privacy-related, but knowledge base-related. Google is building upon a fricking huge search engine via a knowledge graph and the sky is the limit for how well an AI can do. Apple is building on what, a shut down Ping social network, Apple Music listening habits, Wolfram Alpha hopes if all else fails, and a sparse Bing Search API if that failed too?
      - naravara 9y ago
        >While some may prefer a knowledge about you or you via people like you, as in, "Please recommend me a great movie". . . Not to mention that Apple positioned itself as a brand for people who "Think Different." I don't think people who got taken in by that messaging would be attracted to the prospect of services that can more efficiently pigeonhole them.
  - dr1337 9y ago
    The simplest example would be speech recognition. With the exception of Keyword Spotting Systems like Hey Siri or OK Google, it's currently practically impossible to implement larger vocabulary speech recognition on device.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure larger vocabulary local speech recognition on devices with less computing power than modern smartphones has existed (products for continuous speech recognition on PC go back to at least Dragon Naturally Speaking in 1997.)
    - gervase 9y ago
      Google will happily permit you to download trained models of <100MB to your phone via Google Translate, which permit not only offline vocabulary recognition of a remarkably wide range, but will also then translate that input into another language (also offline). I believe the restrictions imposed by keyword-spotting have more to do with the always-listening and/or power-efficient nature of the task, rather than the restrictions on the legibility of offline speech recognition.
  - sheeshkebab 9y ago
    Probably can't get all the metrics and data needed to actually tune/make it work. I periodically delete all my history from google servers, thanks to their privacy tool, and google gets just a dumb for me as siri.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Speech recognition and natural language understanding. If you watched the HomePod reveal you'd know that it sends your speech to the cloud for understanding. Which seems like a pretty clear admission that this can't all be done on-device easily.
- jswny 9y ago
  Totally agree. Lots of commentators here on HN love to get angry about companies like Google collecting so much of their data, which is perfectly justified. However, you have to be willing to accept the consequences of privacy policy like that, which is the kind that Apple somehow still carries out stringently. The consequences are that any service or product that relies on data, ML, AI etc. aren't going to work well coming from a privacy conscious company like Apple, at least not nearly as well as the products from the companies like Google which don't value privacy as much. You can't complain about Google taking your data but also complain about Siri being a load of garbage, you can't have it both ways (and I see lots of people here trying to have it both ways). It will be interesting to see if Apple holds its ground on privacy with the increase of AI/ML driven features and products. Coupled with Apple's closed culture which discourages open research (although they have been improving this), their concern for privacy could put them well behind other companies in this space. Depending on how you look at privacy vs. product, this could be a good thing or bad thing.
- naravara 9y ago
  Aside from recommendation engines and targeted advertising, what does this deep knowledge of everywhere I've been and everything I've done do to dramatically improve the experience of using the AI? I think it makes Apple slower at making their assistant good at parsing what you're saying and returning an answer, but that's a problem that benefits from crunching reams of data in general, not so much knowing everything about you personally. For one thing, a virtual assistant that works even when I don't have an active internet connection seems like a perk in itself no? The Siri approach is closer to being there than the Alexa/Google approach.
macinjosh 9y ago
I am an Apple fanboy but I am also a privacy fanboy. As AI, IoT, and consumer tracking continue to invade our daily lives I think Apple will continue to do quite well if they maintain there pro-privacy heading. Privacy is a feature, it's something people want, and unfortunately its becoming a luxury. That is something that attracts Apple's customers.
- __jal 9y ago
  Can't claim to be a fanboy, but I am a longtime user[1], and this is the primary reason I stick to them for my phone. I frankly can't imagine using Android the way I use my Iphone - the privacy invasions considered acceptable are well in to the "no go" range for me, before even getting to the malware that pass for "free apps". If I were somehow forced to use Android, I'm pretty sure I'd treat it as an adversarial device, mostly like a feature-phone. Trust is vital in devices like this. [1] I'm becoming less of a fan, as MacOS becomes "cloud aware" and less of a Unix workstation.
  - theCricketer 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on Android's weaknesses when it comes to privacy and contrast this with Apple's approach? Asking genuinely to update my understanding.
    - macinjosh 9y ago
      The glib response is to point out the difference between Apple's and Google's business models. Apple makes money by selling devices, Google sells ads (i.e. sells their customers' data to advertisers).
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        And that Apple is the OEM behind the device that runs their OS, and Google (usually) isn't.
        9y ago
eridius 9y ago
Google and Amazon may get there faster, but personally, I'm quite ok with it taking a bit longer to get a truly smart digital assistant if that means I get to keep my privacy.
ProAm 9y ago
Two reasons, One) Apple is currently a lifestyle company and not a technology company so AI is well outside their wheelhouse in what they have spent the last 5 years doing. Two) Apple is never really bleeding edge with it's products, it waits to see what the industry is doing and then subsequently tries to take something and make it better, something tough to do with AI/ML. You can't really just take someone's idea and build on it with $$, there needs to be a lot of groundwork done first to even get to that point and it looks like Apple has barely done any (looking straight at Siri for an example)
- macinjosh 9y ago
  Lifestyle company? What does that even mean? If Apple isn't a tech company I don't know what is. They design their own processors, programming languages, operating systems, web browser, batteries, etc. Sounds like a tech company to me.
  - ProAm 9y ago
    The last few years of their 'tech' have been less than inspiring... They have focused on Apple becoming part of your life with a watch or a touchbar and not updating their hardware and software with anything that moves the needle (AppleTV languishing, Siri a joke compared to Amazon, Google and even Microsoft, MacBook Pros barely updated after years of neglect, MacPro potentially on the horizon for a reasonable update in 2018 after years of nothing. and now HomePod is basically a boombox that connects to the internet...not really a stellar new product especially without AI). This is clearly evident with them in scramble mode with the last several press/developer conferences & intentional leaks (how often has Apple mentioned products that are no where close to shipping?), they are in triage mode. I still feel T.Cook will be out in ~ 2 years.
    - macinjosh 9y ago
      ok
wklauss 9y ago
> Six years later, the technology giant is struggling to find its voice in AI. I know that this is the most common approach to the situation but the article -as many other articles that have argued this before- provides no proof other than analysts speaking in broad strokes. I use Siri, Alexa and Assistant several times a week if not everyday and I'd hesitate a lot before saying that Siri is behind. Alexa is more responsive but it's domain is also more narrow. Siri does a pretty good job when I dictate a message or want to set a timer. It's limited, sure, but so are the other assistants I use. I might be the odd case, but speech recognition of Siri vs Assitant is pretty comparable in my experience. Moving onto services. Google Photos is outstanding, yes. But I fail to see any other example that proves the big advantage other players have over Apple in the ML or AI field. Am I missing something? I feel like a lot of these articles argue their view from the experience they got from Siri 5 years ago.
- blazespin 9y ago
  For me, Siri is horribly behind. I've gone to the point of installing Google on my iPhone and using it even though it's a struggle to activate it compared to Siri. My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking. Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings. I have an iPhone 7
  - naravara 9y ago
    >Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings. I figured that was more of a hardware problem?
    - willyt 9y ago
      Talk to the top of the phone. There is a separate mic up there for Siri. Took me a while to work this out.
  - emiliobumachar 9y ago
    Tangent: wouldn't it be nice if you could say "Siri, ask Google to..." I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically. On one hand, you appeal to people who like other assistants better, or like different assistants for different things. On the other hand, you give up on forcing people to get used to your assistant. Also, could an isolationist provider stop other assistants from calling their one? Technically? Legally?
Osmium 9y ago
On a technical point, I was impressed by their CoreML model format. The specification is open, optimized for maximum transferability, it can convert models from Keras (with TensorFlow), scikit-learn and others, and their Python model converter is also open source: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools Once you have your model as a CoreML file, it is stupidly simple to incorporate it into an app (the live demo with the flower model was very impressive), and Xcode will convert it to a machine-optimized version. I was skeptical when I saw the announcement, but honestly it seems like a game changer -- to be able to drag-and-drop models that other people have trained into an app and use them with virtually zero boilerplate is just great. Video here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/703/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/703/
- koko775 9y ago
  In what sense? caffe2 has been able to run models trained elsewhere for a long time already. Do you mean it in the sense that the mobile platform has a standard that will rally a larger community behind common models?
- shostack 9y ago
  Apparently you can only view that video in Safari or the wwdc app. That's awful.
  - agrahul 9y ago
    I believe it's a HLS video. If you're on Windows, Edge has support for HLS. Otherwise, you'll have to resort to using a media player.
    - shostack 9y ago
      I'm in Firefox on Android.
  - tovkal 9y ago
    There's a Chrome extension that allows you to see the videos: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wwdchrome/lohmkcogbijdfgphbioenppfnjfdjebp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wwdchrome/lohmkcog...
rosstex 9y ago
Me: Hey Siri, what cheese goes well with fruit? Siri: Here's what I found on the web for "What cheese goes well with fruit..." Me: Hey Google, what cheese goes well with fruit? Google: "Edam"
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  You: Hey HN, what cheese goes well with fruit? Me: Which fruit?
- jjuel 9y ago
  Siri: "Oh you have a question. Let me Google that for you."
  - joshstrange 9y ago
    IF ONLY, instead it uses bing....
- willyt 9y ago
  Edam! Stilton surely.
- eridius 9y ago
  I assume you're trying to say that Google's answer is better, right? Google's certainly being more authoritative, but the answer to your question is actually fairly subjective, there's more answers than just "Edam", so IMO surfacing search results is better than just having Google pick one answer. Google's also been known to produce completely incorrect "authoritative" answers.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    If you are speaking to your device for this kind of question, the authoritative answer is what you want. You expect me, after taking to my device, to go over and pick it up and search through web results? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have asked the question by voice in the first place!
orthoganol 9y ago
Well yes, - they don't publish, they don't have a reputation (no teams like FAIR, DeepMind, MetaMind, MSFT AI, etc.), they don't attract the top AI talent, and anecdotally, they don't even even know how to hire for AI (had a brilliant colleague working in AI turned away because he didn't know some facets about the Python language when they hit him with Leetcode whiteboard questions; IMO they aren't in a position with AI where they get to flex programmer egos).
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > had a brilliant colleague working in AI turned away because he didn't know some facets about the Python language when they hit him with Leetcode whiteboard questions I mean, to be fair, isn't that every company? Google pulls the same sort of nonsense.
  - gervase 9y ago
    My understanding is that this is not the case when you get up to the research level, where they use altogether different signaling (citation count, impact factor, etc) to disqualify applicants.
- eridius 9y ago
  > they don't publish Your info is outdated. At a conference last December, Apple's director of AI research announced that their AI researchers will be free to publish their findings. https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publish/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publ...
  - pas 9y ago
    What have they published so far is the question then.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
namuol 9y ago
I love Apple's commitment to privacy, but the notion that privacy precludes powerful AI strikes me as a false dichotomy, and a cop-out. There must be some middle-ground.
- jswny 9y ago
  Anonymous, transparent data-gathering perhaps? If Apple stripped data of any kind of personally-identifying information and allowed users to view all of the data that was being sent, it could be a good middle ground. However, the problem with that solution is that it's already possible (not easy) to identify users with very little information. Stripping out identifying information doesn't necessarily mean that the information wouldn't be useful at all in the right hands (say, the government) to identify someone.
  - eridius 9y ago
    Apple talked last year about their approach here, which IIRC is basically to introduce random noise into the data they collect. This way, data at the individual level may be wildly inaccurate (and therefore not suitable for actually identifying specific people), but in the aggregate it still produces the same results. Of course I may be completely misrepresenting this. I encourage you to go look up the relevant info from WWDC 2016 (I believe that's where they talked about it).
eanzenberg 9y ago
One thing to remember is, it's easier to build AI and ML when you are willing to use lots of user data but it's not impossible if you put limits on your access to user data. For example, when you meet someone, they don't need to know everything about your life to be useful. The same is the case for building internet AIs. Using more pre-trained models. Asking the right questions and listening to the responses. Sure, it's easier if you have access and are willing to use user data to build those predictive models. But there is some real value in the world for companies who respect user privacy AND build predictive models.
NumberSix 9y ago
Regarding privacy, when human beings meet a new person, they do not need tons of data about that person to understand their spoken language. We learn English or any other language once and then rarely need to adapt to new people, unless they have a strong accent or speak a truly different dialect of the language. This demonstrates that the much touted speech recognition technologies from Google, Amazon, and Apple do not match human level performance. Are they really exceeding the marginal performance of the Hidden Markov Model based Dragon Naturally Speaking which took around two months of training to achieve its maximum accuracy ten years ago? Or are they just running similar models with huge numbers of adjustable parameters tuned to each user on the "cloud?" If Apple invested in genuinely new, creative AI technologies that matched human level speech recognition and other tasks then they could preserve their purported emphasis on privacy. They would not need to collect huge amounts of personal data on most customers, unlike Google or Amazon.
- gls2ro 9y ago
  I am not an expert in AI, ML or any other thing like his. But related to > Regarding privacy, when human beings meet a new person, they do not need tons of data about that person to understand their spoken language. I think that we understand context and symbols and syntax because we used it/learned it before. So when I meet a new person I use previous cultural/language learnings to understand the new person. Not just dictionary. And even if I met a person who speaks a new language, I might understand after a period the words but still I use logic and symbols to get that when that person points to ice and says something that something means ice. And this I think is possible because of some previous knowledge on how to interpret the interaction that I discovered before about this context. I think it is the same with Assistants: there is an advantage in being able to access and process large amount of communication so that you can infer meaning or predictions.
mirekrusin 9y ago
AI is a funny field where you may still be in a great position by just having millions of your capable devices distributed to people. Software wise it's relatively easy to adopt state of the art - without necessarily doing research yourself. On the cloud side they have the capacity as well, that's not a blocker for them.
idibidiartists 9y ago
$221B in cash on hand. They can get any AI researcher super start they want. No?
- adrenalinelol 9y ago
  Wall St. would punish them for raising salaries.
- ikeyany 9y ago
  I would love to hear all of the reasons why top minds reject top companies. It's a fascinating subject.
  - remir 9y ago
    The company's culture, perhaps.
jefferson123 9y ago
Honest question: in the context of the realistic range of consumer AI applications in 2017, what are some meaningful shortcomings Apple products have? And do those shortcomings have any interest to the majority of consumers (and not say, to developers or analysts)?
- reckoner2 9y ago
  As an owner of an iPhone 7 and a Pixel I'd say there are not many. Google Assistant is way ahead of Siri at pretty much every imaginable task, and Google Photos can do a lot more than iOS Photos. That said, none of those features interest me much. And I'm not sure how many average consumers they do interest. It's more of a 'oh, that's cool I guess'. I prefer my iPhone 7 still.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Yeah, most people I know do use their 'assistant' to some degree, but it's not even close to crucial for any of them. That said, Siri is a running joke among many of us, so if/when assistants become more important, Apple might have a problem if they don't make some big improvements. Anecdotally speaking, anyways.
ungzd 9y ago
Collecting location data, visited URLs and phone books is absolutely not required to make speech recognition. You don't have to learn computer vision algorithms on people's private photos: you can use public photos instead. Even "context based computing" does not seem to work better if data from all users is put into single database. Why "AI" and surveillance are usually treated as related? Most creepy forms of surveillance are used for ads (but I'm not sure if it even works, I always see completely irrelevant ads) and Apple is not advertising company.
mtgx 9y ago
I bet they won't be quoting this headline at the next WWDC.
eric_b 9y ago
I've still not seen any AI that really gets me excited. Google Now does some neat things - but if the home automation products from Amazon and Google are representative of the state-of-the-art - we have an awful long way to go before AI is any kind of game changer. More likely AI/ML is another trip down buzzword lane. It can hang out with IoT, VR, Big Data, and hell, even containers and microservices. It feels like everyone is casting about for that next revolutionary technological innovation, but maybe we just need to be at a plateau for awhile.
- snarf 9y ago
  I, too, don't get the hype about voice assistants. There are a few uses cases where they may be genuinely useful like if you are driving and don't want to take your hands off the wheel, but for nearly everything else, it is usually faster, more accurate, and more reliable to use a GUI with touch or a keyboard.
endswapper 9y ago
DUPE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499511
mark_l_watson 9y ago
I haven't made up my mind on this yet: I really like Apple's privacy policies but I also like Google Assistant on my iPhone. As usual, for a business trip I took this week, I went all-in with Google (location, my email forwarded to my gmail account, used Google Travell app, etc.). Very convenient for keeping my schedule, travel arrangements, etc. in order. That said, when I returned home last night, as usual after a trip, I stopped forwarding my email to gmail, uninstalled most Google apps from my iPhone, and turned off location. When I am at home (most of the time) I like using duck-duck-go, and just Apple's software. EDIT: I have been working in the field of AI and machine learning for about 30 years. I think that Apple will find a sweet spot between good privacy and making Siri into a useful digital assistant.
patsplat 9y ago
Currently, the only documentation I've seen for extending Siri depend on an app running on a particular device. More than anything else, this device-centric focus is holding Siri back when compared to Alexa and Google Home. Am I missing something? Has there been any announcement that third party developers could add skills or actions across all Siri instances via the cloud?
starchild3001 9y ago
This article ticks me off. Apple announced some really good features on Monday (CoreML and a bunch of ML driven features). Having this kind of article after WWDC is unfair. As a consumer, I applaud Apple's approach. The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. You do need data for Machine Learning (i.e. pattern matching). That's what other tech firms are pursuing. Apple being a hardware, systems and frameworks company is doing the right thing respecting my privacy. They leave data mining and personalization to 3rd party apps. If and when true AI happens, there's a good chance Apple will be leading that. (Why? True AI won't happen overnight, and true AI won't require access to a billion customer's emails or browsing history).
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  I wouldn't worry too much. People keep buying iPhones because they love them, and developers use their platform because of the money and reach. The article is negative, but the two targets for these changes (developers, users) will benefit largely in the time to come.
- Mikushi 9y ago
  > The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. Deepmind / AlphaGo, Watson, and other like them are about the best thing we have nowadays when it comes to AI. Let's not even talk about True AI, which if you take any of the definitions can only become reality with so much data we're only brushing on it actually. Saying True AI won't need as much data is failing to understand how much "data" it takes to make a human brain function, and while that is a whole other can of worm, one thing is certain it's a shit load accumulated over time. > If and when true AI happens, there's a good chance Apple will be leading that. Apple is not even in the same arena when it comes to AI. And they shouldn't be, with the cash piles they have it's better for them to wait for somebody else to make the breakthrough and pull a Siri, buy a company that does what you want and integrate it how is needed for you product / consumers. Also don't confuse AI/True AI with clever algorithm.
  - MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
nikon 9y ago
They've just entered the race no?
norswap 9y ago
I probably won't receive any medals for this, but it is my most humble opinion that most of these AI gimmicks (Siri, Alexa, etc...) are useless. I will concede I get moderate gag value out of Google automatically creating animated gifs from a string of photographs.
lcfcjs 9y ago
There is one reason for this, and one reason alone. Design before Engineering.
strin 9y ago
> ... the company hired Russ Salakhutdinov, a Carnegie Mellon professor whose expertise is in an area of artificial intelligence known as “deep” or “unsupervised” learning, a complex branch of machine learning in which computers are trained to replicate the way the brain’s neurons fire when they recognize objects or speech. The author of the article clearly made a mistake saying "deep learning" is the same as "unsupervised learning".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Fede_V 9y ago
The description of differential privacy in the article is completely wrong. I am really shocked it was described so poorly.
wkoszek 9y ago
Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse, but it just deployed top-notch machine learning frameworks to millions of portable devices around the world in a way in which its hundreds of thousands of developers can use machine learning now. I want to be struggling at investments in the same way. :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thadk 9y ago
Does anyone have details on the AIKit & Apple CNN for AMD graphics cards? This was previously the exclusive territory of Nvidia and this week, Apple promised expanding that for the other half of discrete graphics cards. Will there be Python APIs?
d_burfoot 9y ago
Why on earth does Apple want to become an "AI powerhouse"? Please, Apple, do what you're good at: design great consumer electronic products. You should be hiring the top talent in fields like HCI, AR/VR, and wearable computing, not AI.
real-hacker 9y ago
So the deep learning machinery is becoming part of OS. I am wondering if part of the model (the relatively stable layers) will also be released with OS.
naaaaak 9y ago
WashPo, owned by Bezos whose fortune is in Amazon, is criticizing a competitor.

224 points by ghosh 9y ago

This is interesting because while Apple's (comparative) dedication to privacy is endearing, it's a long-term existential threat. Google knows all about me and its assistant is, usually, great. Amazon has troves of data on what I buy, and I get to yell at Alexa to order more TP as soon as I see we're on the last roll. Apple knows much less about me and, while I'm still an Apple fan and am tied to iPhones/Macs thanks to iMessage, Siri stinks as a result. If voice assistants based on machine learning (specifically, personalized voice assistants) are the next big thing, Apple's privacy ethos will separate it from its major tech competitors – either in a great way, or a very negative way.

spiderfarmer 9y ago
What can Google do in the cloud that Apple can't do on the device?
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  Apple can only look at you to learn - Google can look at you, and a million other people like you
  - naravara 9y ago
    I thought Apple figured out a way to create unique IDs and profiles that can't be traced back to the individual person? So they can still find people like you for analytical purposes to tune their models.
  - jug 9y ago
    I think many Apple users would be happy if only Siri could answer factual questions objectively and follow a conversation, being happy with a minimum of privacy collection like current location, name of spouse for messaging, etc. While some may prefer a knowledge about you or you via people like you, as in, "Please recommend me a great movie", Siri is currently not in a stage where she may tell you stuff like "How do I mix a White Russian?" Google Assistant give me 6 steps with a photo and a follow up question "What about Screwdriver?" Siri gets utterly wrecked in the knowledge based questions. I think the main problem is not privacy-related, but knowledge base-related. Google is building upon a fricking huge search engine via a knowledge graph and the sky is the limit for how well an AI can do. Apple is building on what, a shut down Ping social network, Apple Music listening habits, Wolfram Alpha hopes if all else fails, and a sparse Bing Search API if that failed too?
    - naravara 9y ago
      >While some may prefer a knowledge about you or you via people like you, as in, "Please recommend me a great movie". . . Not to mention that Apple positioned itself as a brand for people who "Think Different." I don't think people who got taken in by that messaging would be attracted to the prospect of services that can more efficiently pigeonhole them.
- dr1337 9y ago
  The simplest example would be speech recognition. With the exception of Keyword Spotting Systems like Hey Siri or OK Google, it's currently practically impossible to implement larger vocabulary speech recognition on device.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure larger vocabulary local speech recognition on devices with less computing power than modern smartphones has existed (products for continuous speech recognition on PC go back to at least Dragon Naturally Speaking in 1997.)
  - gervase 9y ago
    Google will happily permit you to download trained models of <100MB to your phone via Google Translate, which permit not only offline vocabulary recognition of a remarkably wide range, but will also then translate that input into another language (also offline). I believe the restrictions imposed by keyword-spotting have more to do with the always-listening and/or power-efficient nature of the task, rather than the restrictions on the legibility of offline speech recognition.
- sheeshkebab 9y ago
  Probably can't get all the metrics and data needed to actually tune/make it work. I periodically delete all my history from google servers, thanks to their privacy tool, and google gets just a dumb for me as siri.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Speech recognition and natural language understanding. If you watched the HomePod reveal you'd know that it sends your speech to the cloud for understanding. Which seems like a pretty clear admission that this can't all be done on-device easily.
jswny 9y ago
Totally agree. Lots of commentators here on HN love to get angry about companies like Google collecting so much of their data, which is perfectly justified. However, you have to be willing to accept the consequences of privacy policy like that, which is the kind that Apple somehow still carries out stringently. The consequences are that any service or product that relies on data, ML, AI etc. aren't going to work well coming from a privacy conscious company like Apple, at least not nearly as well as the products from the companies like Google which don't value privacy as much. You can't complain about Google taking your data but also complain about Siri being a load of garbage, you can't have it both ways (and I see lots of people here trying to have it both ways). It will be interesting to see if Apple holds its ground on privacy with the increase of AI/ML driven features and products. Coupled with Apple's closed culture which discourages open research (although they have been improving this), their concern for privacy could put them well behind other companies in this space. Depending on how you look at privacy vs. product, this could be a good thing or bad thing.
naravara 9y ago
Aside from recommendation engines and targeted advertising, what does this deep knowledge of everywhere I've been and everything I've done do to dramatically improve the experience of using the AI? I think it makes Apple slower at making their assistant good at parsing what you're saying and returning an answer, but that's a problem that benefits from crunching reams of data in general, not so much knowing everything about you personally. For one thing, a virtual assistant that works even when I don't have an active internet connection seems like a perk in itself no? The Siri approach is closer to being there than the Alexa/Google approach.

macinjosh 9y ago

I am an Apple fanboy but I am also a privacy fanboy. As AI, IoT, and consumer tracking continue to invade our daily lives I think Apple will continue to do quite well if they maintain there pro-privacy heading. Privacy is a feature, it's something people want, and unfortunately its becoming a luxury. That is something that attracts Apple's customers.

__jal 9y ago
Can't claim to be a fanboy, but I am a longtime user[1], and this is the primary reason I stick to them for my phone. I frankly can't imagine using Android the way I use my Iphone - the privacy invasions considered acceptable are well in to the "no go" range for me, before even getting to the malware that pass for "free apps". If I were somehow forced to use Android, I'm pretty sure I'd treat it as an adversarial device, mostly like a feature-phone. Trust is vital in devices like this. [1] I'm becoming less of a fan, as MacOS becomes "cloud aware" and less of a Unix workstation.
- theCricketer 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on Android's weaknesses when it comes to privacy and contrast this with Apple's approach? Asking genuinely to update my understanding.
  - macinjosh 9y ago
    The glib response is to point out the difference between Apple's and Google's business models. Apple makes money by selling devices, Google sells ads (i.e. sells their customers' data to advertisers).
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      And that Apple is the OEM behind the device that runs their OS, and Google (usually) isn't.
      - 9y ago

eridius 9y ago

Google and Amazon may get there faster, but personally, I'm quite ok with it taking a bit longer to get a truly smart digital assistant if that means I get to keep my privacy.

ProAm 9y ago

Two reasons, One) Apple is currently a lifestyle company and not a technology company so AI is well outside their wheelhouse in what they have spent the last 5 years doing. Two) Apple is never really bleeding edge with it's products, it waits to see what the industry is doing and then subsequently tries to take something and make it better, something tough to do with AI/ML. You can't really just take someone's idea and build on it with $$, there needs to be a lot of groundwork done first to even get to that point and it looks like Apple has barely done any (looking straight at Siri for an example)

macinjosh 9y ago
Lifestyle company? What does that even mean? If Apple isn't a tech company I don't know what is. They design their own processors, programming languages, operating systems, web browser, batteries, etc. Sounds like a tech company to me.
- ProAm 9y ago
  The last few years of their 'tech' have been less than inspiring... They have focused on Apple becoming part of your life with a watch or a touchbar and not updating their hardware and software with anything that moves the needle (AppleTV languishing, Siri a joke compared to Amazon, Google and even Microsoft, MacBook Pros barely updated after years of neglect, MacPro potentially on the horizon for a reasonable update in 2018 after years of nothing. and now HomePod is basically a boombox that connects to the internet...not really a stellar new product especially without AI). This is clearly evident with them in scramble mode with the last several press/developer conferences & intentional leaks (how often has Apple mentioned products that are no where close to shipping?), they are in triage mode. I still feel T.Cook will be out in ~ 2 years.
  - macinjosh 9y ago
    ok

wklauss 9y ago

> Six years later, the technology giant is struggling to find its voice in AI. I know that this is the most common approach to the situation but the article -as many other articles that have argued this before- provides no proof other than analysts speaking in broad strokes. I use Siri, Alexa and Assistant several times a week if not everyday and I'd hesitate a lot before saying that Siri is behind. Alexa is more responsive but it's domain is also more narrow. Siri does a pretty good job when I dictate a message or want to set a timer. It's limited, sure, but so are the other assistants I use. I might be the odd case, but speech recognition of Siri vs Assitant is pretty comparable in my experience. Moving onto services. Google Photos is outstanding, yes. But I fail to see any other example that proves the big advantage other players have over Apple in the ML or AI field. Am I missing something? I feel like a lot of these articles argue their view from the experience they got from Siri 5 years ago.

blazespin 9y ago
For me, Siri is horribly behind. I've gone to the point of installing Google on my iPhone and using it even though it's a struggle to activate it compared to Siri. My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking. Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings. I have an iPhone 7
- naravara 9y ago
  >Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings. I figured that was more of a hardware problem?
  - willyt 9y ago
    Talk to the top of the phone. There is a separate mic up there for Siri. Took me a while to work this out.
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  Tangent: wouldn't it be nice if you could say "Siri, ask Google to..." I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically. On one hand, you appeal to people who like other assistants better, or like different assistants for different things. On the other hand, you give up on forcing people to get used to your assistant. Also, could an isolationist provider stop other assistants from calling their one? Technically? Legally?

Osmium 9y ago

On a technical point, I was impressed by their CoreML model format. The specification is open, optimized for maximum transferability, it can convert models from Keras (with TensorFlow), scikit-learn and others, and their Python model converter is also open source: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coremltools Once you have your model as a CoreML file, it is stupidly simple to incorporate it into an app (the live demo with the flower model was very impressive), and Xcode will convert it to a machine-optimized version. I was skeptical when I saw the announcement, but honestly it seems like a game changer -- to be able to drag-and-drop models that other people have trained into an app and use them with virtually zero boilerplate is just great. Video here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/703/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/703/

koko775 9y ago
In what sense? caffe2 has been able to run models trained elsewhere for a long time already. Do you mean it in the sense that the mobile platform has a standard that will rally a larger community behind common models?
shostack 9y ago
Apparently you can only view that video in Safari or the wwdc app. That's awful.
- agrahul 9y ago
  I believe it's a HLS video. If you're on Windows, Edge has support for HLS. Otherwise, you'll have to resort to using a media player.
  - shostack 9y ago
    I'm in Firefox on Android.
- tovkal 9y ago
  There's a Chrome extension that allows you to see the videos: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wwdchrome/lohmkcogbijdfgphbioenppfnjfdjebp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wwdchrome/lohmkcog...

rosstex 9y ago

Me: Hey Siri, what cheese goes well with fruit? Siri: Here's what I found on the web for "What cheese goes well with fruit..." Me: Hey Google, what cheese goes well with fruit? Google: "Edam"

mirekrusin 9y ago
You: Hey HN, what cheese goes well with fruit? Me: Which fruit?
jjuel 9y ago
Siri: "Oh you have a question. Let me Google that for you."
- joshstrange 9y ago
  IF ONLY, instead it uses bing....
willyt 9y ago
Edam! Stilton surely.
eridius 9y ago
I assume you're trying to say that Google's answer is better, right? Google's certainly being more authoritative, but the answer to your question is actually fairly subjective, there's more answers than just "Edam", so IMO surfacing search results is better than just having Google pick one answer. Google's also been known to produce completely incorrect "authoritative" answers.
- wvenable 9y ago
  If you are speaking to your device for this kind of question, the authoritative answer is what you want. You expect me, after taking to my device, to go over and pick it up and search through web results? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have asked the question by voice in the first place!

orthoganol 9y ago

Well yes, - they don't publish, they don't have a reputation (no teams like FAIR, DeepMind, MetaMind, MSFT AI, etc.), they don't attract the top AI talent, and anecdotally, they don't even even know how to hire for AI (had a brilliant colleague working in AI turned away because he didn't know some facets about the Python language when they hit him with Leetcode whiteboard questions; IMO they aren't in a position with AI where they get to flex programmer egos).

santaclaus 9y ago
> had a brilliant colleague working in AI turned away because he didn't know some facets about the Python language when they hit him with Leetcode whiteboard questions I mean, to be fair, isn't that every company? Google pulls the same sort of nonsense.
- gervase 9y ago
  My understanding is that this is not the case when you get up to the research level, where they use altogether different signaling (citation count, impact factor, etc) to disqualify applicants.
eridius 9y ago
> they don't publish Your info is outdated. At a conference last December, Apple's director of AI research announced that their AI researchers will be free to publish their findings. https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publish/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publ...
- pas 9y ago
  What have they published so far is the question then.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

namuol 9y ago

I love Apple's commitment to privacy, but the notion that privacy precludes powerful AI strikes me as a false dichotomy, and a cop-out. There must be some middle-ground.

jswny 9y ago
Anonymous, transparent data-gathering perhaps? If Apple stripped data of any kind of personally-identifying information and allowed users to view all of the data that was being sent, it could be a good middle ground. However, the problem with that solution is that it's already possible (not easy) to identify users with very little information. Stripping out identifying information doesn't necessarily mean that the information wouldn't be useful at all in the right hands (say, the government) to identify someone.
- eridius 9y ago
  Apple talked last year about their approach here, which IIRC is basically to introduce random noise into the data they collect. This way, data at the individual level may be wildly inaccurate (and therefore not suitable for actually identifying specific people), but in the aggregate it still produces the same results. Of course I may be completely misrepresenting this. I encourage you to go look up the relevant info from WWDC 2016 (I believe that's where they talked about it).

eanzenberg 9y ago

One thing to remember is, it's easier to build AI and ML when you are willing to use lots of user data but it's not impossible if you put limits on your access to user data. For example, when you meet someone, they don't need to know everything about your life to be useful. The same is the case for building internet AIs. Using more pre-trained models. Asking the right questions and listening to the responses. Sure, it's easier if you have access and are willing to use user data to build those predictive models. But there is some real value in the world for companies who respect user privacy AND build predictive models.

NumberSix 9y ago

Regarding privacy, when human beings meet a new person, they do not need tons of data about that person to understand their spoken language. We learn English or any other language once and then rarely need to adapt to new people, unless they have a strong accent or speak a truly different dialect of the language. This demonstrates that the much touted speech recognition technologies from Google, Amazon, and Apple do not match human level performance. Are they really exceeding the marginal performance of the Hidden Markov Model based Dragon Naturally Speaking which took around two months of training to achieve its maximum accuracy ten years ago? Or are they just running similar models with huge numbers of adjustable parameters tuned to each user on the "cloud?" If Apple invested in genuinely new, creative AI technologies that matched human level speech recognition and other tasks then they could preserve their purported emphasis on privacy. They would not need to collect huge amounts of personal data on most customers, unlike Google or Amazon.

gls2ro 9y ago
I am not an expert in AI, ML or any other thing like his. But related to > Regarding privacy, when human beings meet a new person, they do not need tons of data about that person to understand their spoken language. I think that we understand context and symbols and syntax because we used it/learned it before. So when I meet a new person I use previous cultural/language learnings to understand the new person. Not just dictionary. And even if I met a person who speaks a new language, I might understand after a period the words but still I use logic and symbols to get that when that person points to ice and says something that something means ice. And this I think is possible because of some previous knowledge on how to interpret the interaction that I discovered before about this context. I think it is the same with Assistants: there is an advantage in being able to access and process large amount of communication so that you can infer meaning or predictions.

mirekrusin 9y ago

AI is a funny field where you may still be in a great position by just having millions of your capable devices distributed to people. Software wise it's relatively easy to adopt state of the art - without necessarily doing research yourself. On the cloud side they have the capacity as well, that's not a blocker for them.

idibidiartists 9y ago

$221B in cash on hand. They can get any AI researcher super start they want. No?

adrenalinelol 9y ago
Wall St. would punish them for raising salaries.
ikeyany 9y ago
I would love to hear all of the reasons why top minds reject top companies. It's a fascinating subject.
- remir 9y ago
  The company's culture, perhaps.

jefferson123 9y ago

Honest question: in the context of the realistic range of consumer AI applications in 2017, what are some meaningful shortcomings Apple products have? And do those shortcomings have any interest to the majority of consumers (and not say, to developers or analysts)?

reckoner2 9y ago
As an owner of an iPhone 7 and a Pixel I'd say there are not many. Google Assistant is way ahead of Siri at pretty much every imaginable task, and Google Photos can do a lot more than iOS Photos. That said, none of those features interest me much. And I'm not sure how many average consumers they do interest. It's more of a 'oh, that's cool I guess'. I prefer my iPhone 7 still.
- mercer 9y ago
  Yeah, most people I know do use their 'assistant' to some degree, but it's not even close to crucial for any of them. That said, Siri is a running joke among many of us, so if/when assistants become more important, Apple might have a problem if they don't make some big improvements. Anecdotally speaking, anyways.

ungzd 9y ago

Collecting location data, visited URLs and phone books is absolutely not required to make speech recognition. You don't have to learn computer vision algorithms on people's private photos: you can use public photos instead. Even "context based computing" does not seem to work better if data from all users is put into single database. Why "AI" and surveillance are usually treated as related? Most creepy forms of surveillance are used for ads (but I'm not sure if it even works, I always see completely irrelevant ads) and Apple is not advertising company.

mtgx 9y ago

I bet they won't be quoting this headline at the next WWDC.

eric_b 9y ago

I've still not seen any AI that really gets me excited. Google Now does some neat things - but if the home automation products from Amazon and Google are representative of the state-of-the-art - we have an awful long way to go before AI is any kind of game changer. More likely AI/ML is another trip down buzzword lane. It can hang out with IoT, VR, Big Data, and hell, even containers and microservices. It feels like everyone is casting about for that next revolutionary technological innovation, but maybe we just need to be at a plateau for awhile.

snarf 9y ago
I, too, don't get the hype about voice assistants. There are a few uses cases where they may be genuinely useful like if you are driving and don't want to take your hands off the wheel, but for nearly everything else, it is usually faster, more accurate, and more reliable to use a GUI with touch or a keyboard.

endswapper 9y ago

DUPE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499511

mark_l_watson 9y ago

I haven't made up my mind on this yet: I really like Apple's privacy policies but I also like Google Assistant on my iPhone. As usual, for a business trip I took this week, I went all-in with Google (location, my email forwarded to my gmail account, used Google Travell app, etc.). Very convenient for keeping my schedule, travel arrangements, etc. in order. That said, when I returned home last night, as usual after a trip, I stopped forwarding my email to gmail, uninstalled most Google apps from my iPhone, and turned off location. When I am at home (most of the time) I like using duck-duck-go, and just Apple's software. EDIT: I have been working in the field of AI and machine learning for about 30 years. I think that Apple will find a sweet spot between good privacy and making Siri into a useful digital assistant.

patsplat 9y ago

Currently, the only documentation I've seen for extending Siri depend on an app running on a particular device. More than anything else, this device-centric focus is holding Siri back when compared to Alexa and Google Home. Am I missing something? Has there been any announcement that third party developers could add skills or actions across all Siri instances via the cloud?

starchild3001 9y ago

This article ticks me off. Apple announced some really good features on Monday (CoreML and a bunch of ML driven features). Having this kind of article after WWDC is unfair. As a consumer, I applaud Apple's approach. The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. You do need data for Machine Learning (i.e. pattern matching). That's what other tech firms are pursuing. Apple being a hardware, systems and frameworks company is doing the right thing respecting my privacy. They leave data mining and personalization to 3rd party apps. If and when true AI happens, there's a good chance Apple will be leading that. (Why? True AI won't happen overnight, and true AI won't require access to a billion customer's emails or browsing history).

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
I wouldn't worry too much. People keep buying iPhones because they love them, and developers use their platform because of the money and reach. The article is negative, but the two targets for these changes (developers, users) will benefit largely in the time to come.
Mikushi 9y ago
> The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. Deepmind / AlphaGo, Watson, and other like them are about the best thing we have nowadays when it comes to AI. Let's not even talk about True AI, which if you take any of the definitions can only become reality with so much data we're only brushing on it actually. Saying True AI won't need as much data is failing to understand how much "data" it takes to make a human brain function, and while that is a whole other can of worm, one thing is certain it's a shit load accumulated over time. > If and when true AI happens, there's a good chance Apple will be leading that. Apple is not even in the same arena when it comes to AI. And they shouldn't be, with the cash piles they have it's better for them to wait for somebody else to make the breakthrough and pull a Siri, buy a company that does what you want and integrate it how is needed for you product / consumers. Also don't confuse AI/True AI with clever algorithm.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

nikon 9y ago

They've just entered the race no?

norswap 9y ago

I probably won't receive any medals for this, but it is my most humble opinion that most of these AI gimmicks (Siri, Alexa, etc...) are useless. I will concede I get moderate gag value out of Google automatically creating animated gifs from a string of photographs.

lcfcjs 9y ago

There is one reason for this, and one reason alone. Design before Engineering.

strin 9y ago

> ... the company hired Russ Salakhutdinov, a Carnegie Mellon professor whose expertise is in an area of artificial intelligence known as “deep” or “unsupervised” learning, a complex branch of machine learning in which computers are trained to replicate the way the brain’s neurons fire when they recognize objects or speech. The author of the article clearly made a mistake saying "deep learning" is the same as "unsupervised learning".

deleted 9y ago
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Fede_V 9y ago

The description of differential privacy in the article is completely wrong. I am really shocked it was described so poorly.

wkoszek 9y ago

Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse, but it just deployed top-notch machine learning frameworks to millions of portable devices around the world in a way in which its hundreds of thousands of developers can use machine learning now. I want to be struggling at investments in the same way. :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

thadk 9y ago

Does anyone have details on the AIKit & Apple CNN for AMD graphics cards? This was previously the exclusive territory of Nvidia and this week, Apple promised expanding that for the other half of discrete graphics cards. Will there be Python APIs?

d_burfoot 9y ago

Why on earth does Apple want to become an "AI powerhouse"? Please, Apple, do what you're good at: design great consumer electronic products. You should be hiring the top talent in fields like HCI, AR/VR, and wearable computing, not AI.

real-hacker 9y ago

So the deep learning machinery is becoming part of OS. I am wondering if part of the model (the relatively stable layers) will also be released with OS.

naaaaak 9y ago

WashPo, owned by Bezos whose fortune is in Amazon, is criticizing a competitor.