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Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief
- jumelles 9y agoAbout time! Apple's got a whole lot of catching up to do if they want Siri to be in competition with Google Asst and Alexa
- abritinthebay 9y agoIt could be more feature rich but I'll take Siri's massive lead in privacy over either of the other two tbh.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoSiri has a massive lead for you and the 5 people who use PGP for their day-to-day email correspondences. That's not enough to build a business on.
- namelost 9y agoMost people just don't care about the voice assistant on their phones, despite the efforts of Google, Apple and Samsung to make them care. Using a voice assistant in a public place still marks you out as some kind of weirdo. Siri is great for setting timers, that's all that matters really.
- king07828 9y agoAgreed. Looking forward to when voice assistants can be taught new tricks by regular device users instead of having the new tricks be programmed by developers.
- abritinthebay 9y agoThings I regularly use Siri for: - timers - sending text messages hands free - controlling homekit stuff - playing music requests (usually in the car) I'm honestly not sure what else I'd use a voice assistant for and Siri works great for all of those tasks. Usually when I have an issue it's due to background noise, so hardly Siri's fault. Quite frankly the "siri is crap" meme seems to be just that: a meme, with very little basis in reality. She's not quite as feature rich as the others but... who cares?
- ucaetano 9y agoGiven this story [1], it will be interesting to see how the differences in culture and openness will allow to perform well inside the company, especially if it requires deprioritizing a walled-garden ecosystem to succeed in AI. 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-now-struggles-to-be-heard-above-the-crowd-1496849095 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-no...
- lavabender 9y ago.
- thedirt0115 9y agoCan you elaborate?
- wufufufu 9y agoedit: original comment was "Inconsiderate timing?" There's an ongoing emergency at the YouTube campus https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter-reported-youtube-hq/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter-re...
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI don't know who is in a worse position. Apple has the problem of a possible trade war. Google on the other hand is going to be regulated with GDPR and whatever the current administration will have to pass due to Facebook. I think I am leaning toward Google having a worse situation due to this move.
- gman83 9y agoI think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up. Their bet will be that consumers are privacy-focused enough to not mind the fact that their products have less AI-focused advancements (e.g. Google Photos). At the end of the day, the only way AI systems currently train themselves is if a lot of users share their data, like Google-users do. Apple provides more of a firewall, but handicaps potential AI systems from using training data in doing so. Also Google has massive mindshare in the AI community with TensorFlow.
- mcphage 9y ago> I think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up. That’s been used to describe every dominant technology company at some point, most of which have been supplanted by now (or else supplanted a company which was previously described in similar terms). Maybe this time it’s true—and Apple certainly has their work cut out for them—but history implies that it’s probably not. Maybe it won’t be Apple, but it’ll probably be somebody.
- gman83 9y ago"I think Microsoft is so many years behind Google in search that they have little hope of catching up" I can think of more examples. I agree, and Microsoft is a good example, that a paradigm shift can totally change the playing field. A desktop software oriented company like Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't take their dominance into an internet oriented market. However Google has managed to transition to mobile and demonstrated they can manage such changes. From what I've seen of fuchsia they're thinking ahead again.
- mikehines 9y agoCan someone share the A.I. background of John Giannandrea? I read his LinkedIn profile and couldn't quite see his strength in the field.
- apsec112 9y agoHe doesn't have an AI background, although I'm sure he's picked up some stuff over the last few years. Google made him head of a bunch of different things because of his project management skills. (I used to work in his department.)
- NickSharp 9y agoIn addition to management, he's an amazing engineer in his own right. (I briefly worked with him at Metaweb)
- hiddencost 9y agoHuh? He founded metaweb out of his PhD, which became the knowledge graph at Google, and is one of the most successful symbolic AI projects in history.
- kolpa 9y agoSymbolic AI is 20th Century AI.
- hiddencost 9y agoPublish some papers in major conferences / journals, ship a few projects to more than 100M people, and get back to me, ok?
- freyir 9y agoNonsense, I trained a deep neural network on MNIST.
- yborg 9y ago
- ForrestN 9y agoI'm curious how this will impact Siri's development. My understanding is that Siri has been (maybe still is?) somewhat ahead in terms of understanding language flexibly and naturally, so if Giannandrea can help them catch up on the things that Google is good at, could they leap ahead?
- twoodfin 9y agoMy uninformed impression is that Google Assistant is exceptionally good at the things Google-the-search-engine is exceptionally good at: Type/say an awkwardly worded query and get a highlighted (and usually correct) answer. It's not clear to me how Siri gets as good at that kind of thing without the Google search index (and all the results quality work that has been Google's bread and butter for over a decade).
- on_and_off 9y agoDo you have a source on this please ? I always thought that siri was well behind on this
- gandutraveler 9y agoOnly thing Siri is good at is replying with annoying jokes on how it can't answer questions.
- dpflan 9y agoAdd to mix the news about Jeff Dean: Jeff Dean takes over as Google’s AI chief (theverge.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353
- nunez 9y agoThat makes a lot of sense. He's been doing crazy AI stuff for a long time.
- minimaxir 9y agoIt's worth noting that Apple does a lot more with AI than just Siri. See the latest updates to Core ML: https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/ Machine learning comes up atleast once-a-keynote, so it's not surprising to see a high-profile hire in the area.
- threeseed 9y agoAI is used all over the place in iOS. In a number of cases it is actually worse than not having it. For example if you force touch the Maps icon it uses a ML model to determine what favourite location to show. Unfortunately it takes a few seconds when really just asking the user for a favourite location would've been better.
- savoytruffle 9y agoallegedly "machine learning" was the reason behind the unicode nonsense text replacement on iOS six months ago.
- jd20 9y agoHeck, they've been doing machine learning since at least 2004, when they added Latent Semantic Analysis for junk mail filtering to the Mail app. And does anybody remember iTunes Genius (collaborative filtering on your playlists in the cloud)? I think Apple has traditionally done a really good job of keeping the technology used under wraps, for better or worse.
- changoplatanero 9y agoI heard rumors from Apple people that Carlos Guestrin in Seattle and Russ Salakhutdinov in Pittsburgh were both trying to be Apple's head ML/AI person. I wonder how Giannandrea's hiring will effect this.
- ttul 9y agoThose other guys are definitely not getting the job.
- s3r3nity 9y agoThis is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years, given that Android had a huge setback in the Oracle v Google case [1]. The huge sell of Android over iOS, besides the customization features, was the Google AI superiority over Siri. My hypothesis is that this move, if executed well, should help narrow the AI perception gap. I think customers know that Google will probably always be superior in AI, but if the gap on mobile is marginal, and combined with the added security that Apple is famous for building into their phones during a time when the Facebook scandal and other data breaches are causing users to be more sensitive to their data, could result in a very interesting market share shift over the next few years. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned-platform/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned-platf...
- nafizh 9y agoThe strength of Google’s AI is not because of its technical superiority (that helps) but because of the huge amount of ubiquitous data it has on users. AI is not magic, it needs data to perform well. Challenge for Apple is where will it get this data to provide customized AI facilities to its users, and this will inevitably lead Apple to the privacy issues Google is facing.
- robotresearcher 9y ago> Challenge for Apple is where will it get this data iPhone, Safari, Maps, Photos, App Store, iTunes Store, Apple Pay, Apple TV... They may never have as much data as Google, but they have a lot. The latest hotness in AI research is self-training, which helps extract more goodness from data. So with some cleverness they may be able mitigate their data disadvantage somewhat. Of course Google works on this area too.
- sorenjan 9y agoMy hypothesis is that most customers doesn't care about AI and that it wont affect phone sales numbers at all.
- s3r3nity 9y ago
- fuddle 9y agoI'm surprised he was able to move straight to Apple. Would Google not have a strict non-compete clause?
- philip1209 9y agoNon-compete agreements are banned in California: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californias-ban-on-non-compete-agreements_us_58af1626e4b0e5fdf6196f04 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californi...
- debt 9y agoMan, he just walked right into that one, huh?
- olefoo 9y agoNon-competes are not legal in California employment law. This is a part of why Silicon Valley happened instead of Boston being the center of tech.
- rayrajsharma 9y ago
- hyperpallium 9y agoApple has a 600 GFLOPS NPU in the iPhone X. Nvidia's $3000 Titan V has a 110 TFLOPS TPU. After a couple of decades of researchers using GPU's for compute, dedicated hardware is available, with a better FLOPS/$ ratio. Looks like the future of compute. We'll see Apple releasing more uses of their NPU for AI.
- mooman219 9y agoI'm not understanding your comment correctly, is it sarcastic? Nvidia doesn't ship a TPU on the Titan V. Also, 0.6 TFLOPS/$1000 vs 36.7 TFLOPS/$1000 is nearly a 2 orders of magnitude difference favoring Nvidia.
- hyperpallium 9y agoIt's not sarcastic. It's not contrasting the two, but pointing out a general shift towards NPU/TPU (as the comment states). Of course a mobile device isn't going to have the same power ratio as a Titan V (It's amazing that the iphone X has 500GF, in addition to its GPU and CPU. I expect it will go much higher; this is just an initial foray). I don't understand the objection to describing the tensor cores of the Titan V as a TPU. As a GPU, it has only around 10TF. How would you describe the tensor cores?
- shaklee3 9y agoPerhaps a more apt comparison is to the Tegra processor, and still, Nvidia crushes apple in performance/Watt.
- hyperpallium 9y agoI wasn't comparing them, but pointing out a trend common to both.
- ipsum2 9y agoFlops is a useless metric in general, there are benchmarks for machine learning that make valid comparisons between CPU/GPU/NPU/etc.
- orionblastar 9y agoWhat happened to their no poaching agreements?
- sangnoir 9y agoThe biggest proponent/driver of the agreement died a few years back (pancreatic cancer).
- TheForumTroll 9y agoThat was only one sided though.
- sangnoir 9y ago> That was only one sided though. Extensively quoting The Verge[1] on the subject: And yet, Intel actually had a written document describing a non-poach agreement with Pixar, where Intel's policy was to not hire any Pixar employee without the Pixar CEO's express approval. "If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel, contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire," read the Intel document. ... "Mr. Jobs wrote: "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this." Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs's email to undisclosed recipients, writing: "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can." Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee "who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour." Mr. Geshuri further wrote: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again." Three days later, Shona Brown, Google's Senior Vice President for Business Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri, writing: "Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group." 1. https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-unredacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-...
- cobbzilla 9y agoWas I the only one who read the headline as "Apple Hires Google's AI Chef"? The Google cafeteria has gotten seriously high-tech: now they have an AI-powered chef cooking meals. It knows what you want to eat before you do! The AI Chef is so popular that Google is now selling AI Chef services to other corporate cafeterias.
- telltruth 9y agoThis guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000 ft. He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name. I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field let alone what kind of actual technical details he knows. As far as I have known these sort of people, they wear suits, memorize buzz words that their reports talk about and take credit of work done by their reports. Such “AI exec” hire is no-op in my book and it isn’t a surprise that Apple has to run PR articles to justify their purchase of a suit.
- te_chris 9y agoHow is this the top comment?
- telltruth 9y agoTo begin with, it shouldn’t be hard to see that this article is written by Apple PR and then handed over to journalists. This guy was never Google’s AI chief, that person - if there is one - is Jeff Dean. It’s strange to see Apple parading around a suit who basically managed hodge podge of projects at Google and calling him Google’s AI chief. Go ask around anyone who has anything to do with AI and drop his name and you will get blank stares.
- hmm_really 9y agoYep PR release, help keep shareholders happy. However I would argue hiring a 'suit' who was CTO for a reputable knowledge based AI company 8 years ago, and since been in a strategic position during Googles recent progress is more valuable to Apple at this time than a well published researcher.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoThe mods were asleep.
- gutnor 9y agoThat's funny to see the whole range of opinion about management on HN. It varies from this one, the very bottom, the leech living of his team of engineers, to Elon Musk, the engineering genius whose team(s) is acknowledged at best as an afterthought.
- DmitryOlshansky 9y agoAll the AI movements... Yet they still can’t get basic full text search right in Apple Music.
- jonhendry18 9y agoIs Giannandrea an "AI guy"? His background, albeit impressive, suggests he's more of a search guy who got AI added to his plate of responsibilities. Maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't. Anyone know? I'm just wondering if Apple hired a fine executive, just maybe not the best person to run AI.