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Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

175 points by arunbahl 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago
I agree that Apple is underrated here, and I think their rigid user interfaces for things like Photos hides the power of their platform. It seems absurd to let Google Photos slurp up your data server side when your iPhone can do 80+% of the photo categorization automatically. It’s equally absurd that Apple has a glacial pace of change for the user side.
- TheArcane 6y ago
  Apple photos should introduce an unlimited compressed picture upload like Google photos does
  - spaceisballer 6y ago
    I mean Google is analyzing your photos for that service. You can pay for iCloud storage. I’m totally fine paying 2.99/mo for my wife and I to not worry about our backups or having space on our phones for photos.
    - canofbars 6y ago
      I just use my nextcloud server which has 3TB free. Works decent but doesn't integrate with the OS as well, still keeps my photos backed up which is the main thing.
- david-cako 6y ago
  True, Apple has a big advantage by having a sense for the baseline-level of computing power on client devices, which is pretty high across the board. The uniformity of UX is worth the glacial rate, IMO. The more ScrollViews with arbitrarily laid out content (Photos seems to have these increasingly), the less intuitive I find apps. In Photos, I find it hard to get a sense for what menu-depth I'm at. Apple has a very logical master-detail layout across most apps, and I hope with Mac Catalyst that Apple continues to enforce consistent UI practices. The more freedom developers are given to put any old layout, the more apps start feeling the way Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP feels on Windows; it's like you have to start thinking about "Okay, when was this app designed?" to figure out how to use it.
  - jolux 6y ago
    plus all of those UI frameworks totally suck in one way or another
- foota 6y ago
  One person's slurping is another's always accessible
  - setr 6y ago
    It could still be always accesible, without the middleman actually being able to read the data.
    - foota 6y ago
      Yes, but also no. It's a less convenient flow, and indexing and such would be trickier than either centralized or on device, since you'd need to encrypt and distribute the index as well (or do homomorphic encryption, but I don't think it's ready for the limelight.) I think most people are probably fine with the tradeoff between convenience and features that centralization offers, so unfortunately people that aren't are stuck with more niche products (or Apple, I suppose, although I don't think i-cloud is end to end encrypted?). I say they're stuck with niche products because I don't think it makes sense to try and offer a slider between convenience and privacy in one product, since the interface and feature sets would be so different.
- marmshallow 6y ago
  In my and several of my friends' experience, Google Photos search is simply much, much better than Apple Photos. Even though I use Apple Photos personally, I have to admit Google's is just better. My friends always say "if I can't search for my photos easily, what's the point in amassing a large collection?".
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    It's not just search. Google Photos "slurps" photos at 10-20x the rate of Photos.app with clear indication of what's happening and what's being uploaded. Photos... just sits there. To get a new photo to my desktop it's faster to open Google Photos on my desktop and download the photo from there than wait for both Photos.apps to finish syncing.
    - lowdose 6y ago
      It would be nice to have an option to not delete every photo after backing up to Google Photos.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Search for object detection on your iPhone. It’s way better than the experience on a Mac.
Despegar 6y ago
This piece is interesting because Apple was saying this all along but no one really believed them because it sounded like excuse making. But here JG is basically saying the same thing: >Yes, I understand this perception of bigger models in data centers somehow are more accurate, but it's actually wrong. It's actually technically wrong. It's better to run the model close to the data, rather than moving the data around. And whether that's location data—like what are you doing— [or] exercise data—what's the accelerometer doing in your phone—it's just better to be close to the source of the data, and so it's also privacy preserving. A few years ago was when this narrative was at its peak and I believe it was mostly because Google (and to a lesser extent Facebook) were talking about machine learning and AI in basically every public communication. What came of it? Were all the people who claimed Apple's privacy stance would leave them in the dust proven right? For one, being "good at machine learning" is like saying you're good at database technology. It's a building block, not a product. Maybe Google and Facebook are doing cutting edge research in the field, but so was Xerox PARC.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It still sounds like excuse-making because Apple are behind in their own chosen terms: their competitor launched on-device machine translation a long time ago. The only remaining part of Apple’s AI privacy story is insinuation.
- skybrian 6y ago
  It's not my area, but I read Google's AI blog and they seem to be doing machine learning research that ends up in its phones, such as various camera improvements and offline Google Translate. It seems like it's the sort of thing you do when you can, but often it comes as a second phase after getting it to work in the data center. I didn't see anything in this article that was obviously unique to Apple.
  - jolux 6y ago
    I think a lot of people have underrated the benefits Apple reaps in this area from being so far ahead in chip design and controlling their hardware. As regards to successfully productizing ML I’ve recently become convinced that Apple has been more successful at it than Google so far. Translation was already well within Google’s wheelhouse and they had been doing it for years, and their work with cameras is going to inevitably be hindered by the fact that they can’t depend on certain specs the way Apple can. I suspect the Pixel exists at least partially to prove that they understand those benefits.
f2322323ffff3 6y ago
One thing where apple is shining is brainwashing. It looks very funny when caravans of people are waiting store opening to hysterically buy an overpriced smartphone, even if it's technologically 2 years behind cheaper Samsung S20 (except chip performance, but it doesn't matter anymore, because there is no tasks that needs so much computing power)
- macintux 6y ago
  You’re looking for a different website.
- enjeyw 6y ago
  > because there is no tasks that needs so much computing power I think your own point explains why people are more than happy to use a more expensive iPhone despite technological differences. I'm currently developing with a relatively new android phone, but I'd never use it as an actual day-to-day phone in lieu of my circa 2014 iPhone (believe me I've tried). The extent to which I prefer the overall iPhone experience far outweighs any technological upper-hand that the android has. In the scheme of things, phone technology has barely shifted in 6 years; a supposed 2 year difference is utterly negligible. Side note: what's the deal with the Google Play store??! I tried to download facebook messenger a few days ago for testing, and accidentally downloaded an entirely different app with a very similar name and icon as it somehow managed to occupy the top listing (ad?). Seems obscene that it's so easy to mount a phishing attack against android users.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    I just switched from a pixel 2 to an iphone 11. For me it seems that iOS and Android are pretty level quality wise, they both have minor things that they do better but the number one thing that makes the iphone better to me is they are able to do all the awesome stuff android does without sending your data away for processing. Having image recognition without the privacy loss is worth the price tag to me.
- peteretep 6y ago
  > even if it's technologically 2 years behind cheaper Samsung S20 (except chip performance Examples?
innagadadavida 6y ago
Funnily, the one data that seems to matter for Siri is the web and wiki data for question answering. Siri still uses wolfram for many trivial questions. None of this is about privacy or user data and Siri is behind the state of the art here.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Apple is behind in AI. Google has Google Lens, real-time transcription of audio recordings, live captions. And Google Assistant is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri in nearly every way. What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at?
- radicaldreamer 6y ago
  Marketing
- mr_toad 6y ago
  I haven’t seen an Android phone with good face recognition yet.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rvz 6y ago
  Yes, Apple is behind in AI research and contributions. In every WWDC or product announcement they will try to convince us that their AI is with 'privacy in mind'. Well all know that's not true. You have to get that data somewhere. > What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at? Excellent Question. Unless we get Apple's equivalent of OpenAI, DeepMind or FAIR then the answer is always nothing.
tialaramex 6y ago
Show don't tell. You don't lead in AI or anything else by insisting everybody who noticed you're bad at something "has it wrong".
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Did you read the article? The whole point was that Apple has innovated but that they don’t make a big deal out of it. Marketing, basically.
  - rvz 6y ago
    Yes, it's more marketing than research here. They still push their reality distortion spells on us to believe that they're an AI leader but in reality they innovate on the ideas of others; just like old times. > Did you read the article? I really hope you have read the HN guidelines [0] > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      I did not read the guidelines. My mistake. You’re right.
Veedrac 6y ago
Apple's AI work is decent for what it is, and their AI hardware is fine too, but so much of this article is just weird. It starts by talking about how until recently Apple wasn't doing AI work where it needed to be. Then there's the weird excerpt where he claims Google is “not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people.” The author then raises the legitimate point that AI benefits from having lots of data to train on, but then quotes an answer by Giannandrea to a different question, which includes him stating that bigger models aren't more accurate than smaller ones. The point that on-device inference is more responsive is valid but not unique to Apple; the article says “Android phones don't do nearly as wide an array of machine learning tasks locally”, but I don't think this is true.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  Was it written by gpt3?
- jolux 6y ago
  Apple’s chips are way better so whether they’re doing more locally or not they have the headroom to do a lot more. I would agree with that characterization of Google. They have a very small handful of successes and an enormous pile of failures that they’ve discarded. They give every impression of not really knowing what to do. I think Giannandrea was also referring specifically to the kinds of experiences Apple can provide on the iOS and iPadOS platform because of their high end hardware and deep software integration. Google has yet to replicate that, and even seem to be bored with Android recently: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/05/wear-os-music https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/05/wear-os-music
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    What AI failures have Google had? Google Home is much better than Siri or Alexa. The camera feature in Google Translate works really well. Their new auto subtitles on Android work really well. Searching photos for objects works really well. The only thing I can think of is that think they demoed that would call restaurants to book them for you, but that was clearly highly experimental, and it's not like Apple has done that.
LeicaLatte 6y ago
Fluff Piece. Apple PR machine learning that techies read ars Technica.
- x42n 6y ago
  Absolutely! Crafted to 1) Create interest and talent pipeline 2) identify and funnel user frustrations and comparisons.
jointpdf 6y ago
Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcing the same correction multiple times (i.e. you go back to fix its error, and it defiantly repeats it), contraction mixups, blindness to off-by-one-keystroke errors (consentuallt -> <no action>), and of course the occasional random word substitution. Only martial artists want to duck people (and it—no joke—just now substituted [duck -> suck]. You had one job autocorrect.) Is this just me? Is it actually 2020? What is going on?
- godelski 6y ago
  This also happens to me on Android. Working in ML, this is something to point to when people hype it up. We've come a long way, but we still got a long way to go. As for specific errors, does rock capitalize when "the" is before it? (The Rock) The models learn from how users write. But when you think about it, it is actually fairly difficult to predict what words are going to be, you can test it with your friends. Have them create a sentence and feed you one word at a time. The better you know the person the better you'll do, but I'm guessing you still won't be that good.
  - stefco_ 6y ago
    Predicting subsequent words is hard for humans, but correcting typos is easy. I've turned off autocorrect completely because my typos are always immediately decodable to their human audience, moreso than Apple's seemingly random modifications.
  - jointpdf 6y ago
    The most disruptive errors are those that could seemingly be cleaned up with some simple rules (e.g. if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it). This doesn’t seem like a “state of ML” issue—the Gmail text completion is annoyingly good, and you-know-who can compose soliloquies and smut with uncanny skill. And no, I don’t often discuss The Rock, but if I did (“Do you smell what the r...”) I'd expect it to finish the alley-oop. I do not want to go Rock climbing. iMessage is software that is used <Carl Sagan voice> billions and billions of times a day, and half the time it feels like verbal jiu-jitsu (“jiu-hursuit” according to autocorrect just now) with Dory the fish.
majestik 6y ago
> After a brief pause, he added: "I guess the biggest problem I have is that many of our most ambitious products are the ones we can't talk about and so it's a bit of a sales challenge to tell somebody, 'Come and work on the most ambitious thing ever but I can't tell you what it is.'" JG, I don’t think that’s your “biggest problem” - Siri is. Your privacy centric on-device strategy limits your view of user feedback, Google gets a lot of shit wrong but they know how to transmit user data and understand their feedback.
29athrowaway 6y ago
What is AI? Your washer machine and some rice cookers use AI (fuzzy logic) Everything uses AI. A program with an if statement is AI.
Syeposxr 6y ago
It's the decline of Intel and the advancements Apple has made in designing its own processors that I think are really interesting. Having powerful and efficient processors on mobile devices - both laptops and phones - allows Apple to do edge computing in a way other companies haven't been able to, and integrate ML in much more privacy-focused way.
throwaway202020 6y ago
You can't be AI leader when every AI leader is staying away from you by 10ft pole. When Ian Goodfellow joined Apple, there was literally rain of criticism on him from ending his career as researcher to bowing down to money. I don't know of any researcher who does want to have continued research career willing to join Apple. They simply don't allow that kind of freedom or publishing results. While Apple has some strong points in imaging (thanks to their 1000+ people team) and wrist rejection, virtually everything else they do that requires AI sucks and lags behind competition, including, Siri, maps, autocorrect, spell check, iCloud, search, calendar, spam detection, recommendations etc. For most of these things, most people don't even count them as real competition. Google on the other hand is able to achieve very competitive performance through software and AI without such large team on phone camera and frankly quite pathetic hardware. These kind of reality distortion pieces aren't going to help them. They have $100+B, in cash, they can easily start reputable open research lab that can rival FAIR, OpenAI or DeepMind. Even a smaller companies like Intel and Adobe is starting to realize that this is necessary so they can tap into expertise on demand. At minimum that will be totally worth for a talent pipeline that can be motivated to do "rotation" or "sabbaticals" into product groups from an open lab.
- bitxbit 6y ago
  That’s an interesting take. Does Apple really lag? I think quote-unquote AI in SV has pretty much stalled in the past 3-4 years. There’s been a lot of volume in ML but nothing groundbreaking.
  - throwaway202020 6y ago
    That's not true at all. AI is everywhere. When Gmail completes your sentence, auto-playlist gets created, camera detects a pet, you take night shot of a city, grammar suggestions are shown, wrong keystrokes auto-corrects, voice mail is transcribed, phone call is responded by quick text, your sleep is analysed, heart rate is monitored on runs, news articles gets recommended, spam email gets filtered, device idle detected... I can go on. Most of these problems cannot be simply solved by just throwing in best engineers. No amount of classical algorithms you learned as CS major is going to help you implement the best solutions for these problems. The state of art solutions to these problems requires intense narrowly focused researchers who have studied these problems for many years, knows which 10% of the papers even worth looking at and pro/cons of different techniques. Something as benign as running neural net on phone hardware is intensely researched subject and your implementation can be literally 10X to 100X better at speed and power consumption if you have kept up with the field.
lacker 6y ago
"Google is an amazing company, and there's some really great technologists working there," he said. "But fundamentally, their business model is different and they're not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people." What does he mean by this? Google search and Android are both used by more than a billion people. YouTube over 2 billion. These are all bigger than any Apple product. If anything, Google is known for shipping consumer experiences that reach a large number of people. Apple by contrast is known for its high-quality, high-price consumer experiences that reach fewer people.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  He's just being subtle and putting it short of Apple's usual marketing speak - "We chose not to sell Data" perhaps as a goodwill to his former company. Btw, >they're not known for shipping consumer experiences IMO, difference is not in selling 'consumer experiences' but selling 'consumer aspirations', which you rightly pointed out is not for many.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shrimpx 6y ago
  I thought that was odd, too. My best guess is that he’s emphasizing “known” as in notorious. Apple is “that company that ships experiences” whereas google is that company that records you while you use their apps or whatever.
  - pas 6y ago
    Is that even true? I mean on HN sure, but in the general population ... I have no idea what's the perception of Google.
- m463 6y ago
  I would say it slightly different: Google is known for shipping experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people. Unfortunately that model means they have to ignore everyone individually.
OrangeKnucles 6y ago
When it comes to making software, Facebook and Google are the best. Apple is slightly ahead of Samsung :'-D They couldn't even get the launch of Notes app right last year.
pcr910303 6y ago
I like this article. I like Apple’s approach to ML because it blends in. When applied, the feature should not expose that it’s based on ML — that’s a failure. And so Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant are failures. But Face ID, plam rejection are successes. If you have to explain the customers that it’s ML based, that’s the same as asking for the customers to understand it’s unreliability. And unreliable features are worse than no features, and that’s why nobody uses Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant except for a few reliably-working requests.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hepinhei 6y ago
An interview full of nothing.... When they say Google has no experience shipping user experience used by millions of people
NicoJuicy 6y ago
Don't have iOS. But I do wish that Android with detect the current language you are writing in. I have 3 languages on my keyboard and sometimes it suggests an autocomplete in the wrong language.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  I have German, English and Polish and it works perfectly.
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    Not so great with Dutch, French and English though. Weird
    - Krasnol 6y ago
      I was very surprised with how good it actually was for Polish. It's a hard language and not as good covered usually with ML as English or German is.
m3kw9 6y ago
Aside from what they say, they still can’t get their iOS AI based spelling correction up to par.
cromwellian 6y ago
(Googler here) I feel article presents a false dichotomy/view (imho borderline disingenuous impression) that Apple is doing on-device, and everyone else is doing on-cloud. Android also does on-device. A lot of the time, things start out on-cloud, until whatever machine learning model can be shrunk to run on-device at the right performance. So you see for example, text-to-speech and speech-to-text start out as cloud calls, and now they're on-device. Google Translate ran in the cloud, but now for some languages, it happens on-device. Things like Google's "Live Transcription/Caption" on Android wouldn't work if it wasn't on-device. Apple similarly went to the cloud for Siri speech recognition and TTS until they could run it locally. For other things which need large models, there is Federated Learning to preserve privacy. Google Keyboard has been using Federated Learning for some time now.
jml78 6y ago
Did the interviewer not know enough about ML to even challenge the bogus statements. Yes, apple’s strategy is more privacy protecting. But holy hell, yes larger data sets are going to be more accurate and the resultant model doesn’t have to run in the cloud, it can run locally. AI training in a data center with large data sets, ship the model to local devices to execute. That is ALWAYS going to be better and more accurate than what Apple is doing.
bambax 6y ago
> Machine learning is used to help the iPad's software distinguish between a user accidentally pressing their palm against the screen while drawing with the Apple Pencil, and an intentional press meant to provide an input. It's used to monitor users' usage habits to optimize device battery life and charging, both to improve the time users can spend between charges and to protect the battery's longterm viability. It's used to make app recommendations. The problem with machine learning altering the behavior of a device is it shortcuts human learning. The human brain is very good at learning deep insights about things and its environment and alters its behavior accordingly. If things change while we're learning about them, it confuses and upsets us. A dumb machine is much easier to use than a "smart" one.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  This might be true for mostly user interface stuff. But for things that are happening under the hood, a human mind will get accustomed to a gradually improving user experience. Apples mantra seems to be to make everyone use the device as per their whims and fancy, and let the device figure out how to deal with it. Ultimately what this leads to is a user experience lock in, where other devices that dont adapt feel clumsy or stupid.
georgespencer 6y ago
I don't know anyone who believes that Siri is as good as Alexa. I spent four months self-isolating in an apartment with the small hockey puck Alexa devices in random corners and returned to my big open plan apartment with two paired HomePods on the kitchen counter. The frequency with which Siri shits its pants (can't help, asks me to excuse it being slow as it tries to set a timer, mishears me, etc.) is honestly remarkable. (Not to mention the fact that my phone continues to alert me to text messages read on my Mac or iPad whole minutes ago.) Apple is still working to overcome deep problems in both its cloud infrastructure and AI/ML. If they cannot be honest about this, they should not be dishonestly trying to present a picture of all being well.
- antipaul 6y ago
  Apple says they do on-device, so yea, why is Siri "thinking" for 20 seconds when I ask it to set a timer for 10 minutes for the 1000th time
amelius 6y ago
NVidia thinks they're an AI leader too, and they're probably closer to the truth.
lowdose 6y ago
It's like saying you are the smartest girl of the city. When you have to say it yourself you probably aren't.
segmondy 6y ago
Apple is a fashion house. They will be around for quite a while, and still have time to turn things around, but if they keep at their current pace, they will be back to irrelevance in 2 decades. Apple builds beautiful looking hardware. Software wise? Complete garbage.

175 points by arunbahl 6y ago

I agree that Apple is underrated here, and I think their rigid user interfaces for things like Photos hides the power of their platform. It seems absurd to let Google Photos slurp up your data server side when your iPhone can do 80+% of the photo categorization automatically. It’s equally absurd that Apple has a glacial pace of change for the user side.

TheArcane 6y ago
Apple photos should introduce an unlimited compressed picture upload like Google photos does
- spaceisballer 6y ago
  I mean Google is analyzing your photos for that service. You can pay for iCloud storage. I’m totally fine paying 2.99/mo for my wife and I to not worry about our backups or having space on our phones for photos.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    I just use my nextcloud server which has 3TB free. Works decent but doesn't integrate with the OS as well, still keeps my photos backed up which is the main thing.
david-cako 6y ago
True, Apple has a big advantage by having a sense for the baseline-level of computing power on client devices, which is pretty high across the board. The uniformity of UX is worth the glacial rate, IMO. The more ScrollViews with arbitrarily laid out content (Photos seems to have these increasingly), the less intuitive I find apps. In Photos, I find it hard to get a sense for what menu-depth I'm at. Apple has a very logical master-detail layout across most apps, and I hope with Mac Catalyst that Apple continues to enforce consistent UI practices. The more freedom developers are given to put any old layout, the more apps start feeling the way Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP feels on Windows; it's like you have to start thinking about "Okay, when was this app designed?" to figure out how to use it.
- jolux 6y ago
  plus all of those UI frameworks totally suck in one way or another
foota 6y ago
One person's slurping is another's always accessible
- setr 6y ago
  It could still be always accesible, without the middleman actually being able to read the data.
  - foota 6y ago
    Yes, but also no. It's a less convenient flow, and indexing and such would be trickier than either centralized or on device, since you'd need to encrypt and distribute the index as well (or do homomorphic encryption, but I don't think it's ready for the limelight.) I think most people are probably fine with the tradeoff between convenience and features that centralization offers, so unfortunately people that aren't are stuck with more niche products (or Apple, I suppose, although I don't think i-cloud is end to end encrypted?). I say they're stuck with niche products because I don't think it makes sense to try and offer a slider between convenience and privacy in one product, since the interface and feature sets would be so different.
marmshallow 6y ago
In my and several of my friends' experience, Google Photos search is simply much, much better than Apple Photos. Even though I use Apple Photos personally, I have to admit Google's is just better. My friends always say "if I can't search for my photos easily, what's the point in amassing a large collection?".
- dmitriid 6y ago
  It's not just search. Google Photos "slurps" photos at 10-20x the rate of Photos.app with clear indication of what's happening and what's being uploaded. Photos... just sits there. To get a new photo to my desktop it's faster to open Google Photos on my desktop and download the photo from there than wait for both Photos.apps to finish syncing.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    It would be nice to have an option to not delete every photo after backing up to Google Photos.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Search for object detection on your iPhone. It’s way better than the experience on a Mac.

Despegar 6y ago

This piece is interesting because Apple was saying this all along but no one really believed them because it sounded like excuse making. But here JG is basically saying the same thing: >Yes, I understand this perception of bigger models in data centers somehow are more accurate, but it's actually wrong. It's actually technically wrong. It's better to run the model close to the data, rather than moving the data around. And whether that's location data—like what are you doing— [or] exercise data—what's the accelerometer doing in your phone—it's just better to be close to the source of the data, and so it's also privacy preserving. A few years ago was when this narrative was at its peak and I believe it was mostly because Google (and to a lesser extent Facebook) were talking about machine learning and AI in basically every public communication. What came of it? Were all the people who claimed Apple's privacy stance would leave them in the dust proven right? For one, being "good at machine learning" is like saying you're good at database technology. It's a building block, not a product. Maybe Google and Facebook are doing cutting edge research in the field, but so was Xerox PARC.

jeffbee 6y ago
It still sounds like excuse-making because Apple are behind in their own chosen terms: their competitor launched on-device machine translation a long time ago. The only remaining part of Apple’s AI privacy story is insinuation.
skybrian 6y ago
It's not my area, but I read Google's AI blog and they seem to be doing machine learning research that ends up in its phones, such as various camera improvements and offline Google Translate. It seems like it's the sort of thing you do when you can, but often it comes as a second phase after getting it to work in the data center. I didn't see anything in this article that was obviously unique to Apple.
- jolux 6y ago
  I think a lot of people have underrated the benefits Apple reaps in this area from being so far ahead in chip design and controlling their hardware. As regards to successfully productizing ML I’ve recently become convinced that Apple has been more successful at it than Google so far. Translation was already well within Google’s wheelhouse and they had been doing it for years, and their work with cameras is going to inevitably be hindered by the fact that they can’t depend on certain specs the way Apple can. I suspect the Pixel exists at least partially to prove that they understand those benefits.

f2322323ffff3 6y ago

One thing where apple is shining is brainwashing. It looks very funny when caravans of people are waiting store opening to hysterically buy an overpriced smartphone, even if it's technologically 2 years behind cheaper Samsung S20 (except chip performance, but it doesn't matter anymore, because there is no tasks that needs so much computing power)

macintux 6y ago
You’re looking for a different website.
enjeyw 6y ago
> because there is no tasks that needs so much computing power I think your own point explains why people are more than happy to use a more expensive iPhone despite technological differences. I'm currently developing with a relatively new android phone, but I'd never use it as an actual day-to-day phone in lieu of my circa 2014 iPhone (believe me I've tried). The extent to which I prefer the overall iPhone experience far outweighs any technological upper-hand that the android has. In the scheme of things, phone technology has barely shifted in 6 years; a supposed 2 year difference is utterly negligible. Side note: what's the deal with the Google Play store??! I tried to download facebook messenger a few days ago for testing, and accidentally downloaded an entirely different app with a very similar name and icon as it somehow managed to occupy the top listing (ad?). Seems obscene that it's so easy to mount a phishing attack against android users.
- canofbars 6y ago
  I just switched from a pixel 2 to an iphone 11. For me it seems that iOS and Android are pretty level quality wise, they both have minor things that they do better but the number one thing that makes the iphone better to me is they are able to do all the awesome stuff android does without sending your data away for processing. Having image recognition without the privacy loss is worth the price tag to me.
peteretep 6y ago
> even if it's technologically 2 years behind cheaper Samsung S20 (except chip performance Examples?

innagadadavida 6y ago

Funnily, the one data that seems to matter for Siri is the web and wiki data for question answering. Siri still uses wolfram for many trivial questions. None of this is about privacy or user data and Siri is behind the state of the art here.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

Apple is behind in AI. Google has Google Lens, real-time transcription of audio recordings, live captions. And Google Assistant is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri in nearly every way. What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at?

radicaldreamer 6y ago
Marketing
mr_toad 6y ago
I haven’t seen an Android phone with good face recognition yet.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rvz 6y ago
Yes, Apple is behind in AI research and contributions. In every WWDC or product announcement they will try to convince us that their AI is with 'privacy in mind'. Well all know that's not true. You have to get that data somewhere. > What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at? Excellent Question. Unless we get Apple's equivalent of OpenAI, DeepMind or FAIR then the answer is always nothing.

tialaramex 6y ago

Show don't tell. You don't lead in AI or anything else by insisting everybody who noticed you're bad at something "has it wrong".

cwhiz 6y ago
Did you read the article? The whole point was that Apple has innovated but that they don’t make a big deal out of it. Marketing, basically.
- rvz 6y ago
  Yes, it's more marketing than research here. They still push their reality distortion spells on us to believe that they're an AI leader but in reality they innovate on the ideas of others; just like old times. > Did you read the article? I really hope you have read the HN guidelines [0] > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    I did not read the guidelines. My mistake. You’re right.

Veedrac 6y ago

Apple's AI work is decent for what it is, and their AI hardware is fine too, but so much of this article is just weird. It starts by talking about how until recently Apple wasn't doing AI work where it needed to be. Then there's the weird excerpt where he claims Google is “not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people.” The author then raises the legitimate point that AI benefits from having lots of data to train on, but then quotes an answer by Giannandrea to a different question, which includes him stating that bigger models aren't more accurate than smaller ones. The point that on-device inference is more responsive is valid but not unique to Apple; the article says “Android phones don't do nearly as wide an array of machine learning tasks locally”, but I don't think this is true.

plutonorm 6y ago
Was it written by gpt3?
jolux 6y ago
Apple’s chips are way better so whether they’re doing more locally or not they have the headroom to do a lot more. I would agree with that characterization of Google. They have a very small handful of successes and an enormous pile of failures that they’ve discarded. They give every impression of not really knowing what to do. I think Giannandrea was also referring specifically to the kinds of experiences Apple can provide on the iOS and iPadOS platform because of their high end hardware and deep software integration. Google has yet to replicate that, and even seem to be bored with Android recently: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/05/wear-os-music https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/05/wear-os-music
- IshKebab 6y ago
  What AI failures have Google had? Google Home is much better than Siri or Alexa. The camera feature in Google Translate works really well. Their new auto subtitles on Android work really well. Searching photos for objects works really well. The only thing I can think of is that think they demoed that would call restaurants to book them for you, but that was clearly highly experimental, and it's not like Apple has done that.

LeicaLatte 6y ago

Fluff Piece. Apple PR machine learning that techies read ars Technica.

x42n 6y ago
Absolutely! Crafted to 1) Create interest and talent pipeline 2) identify and funnel user frustrations and comparisons.

jointpdf 6y ago

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcing the same correction multiple times (i.e. you go back to fix its error, and it defiantly repeats it), contraction mixups, blindness to off-by-one-keystroke errors (consentuallt -> <no action>), and of course the occasional random word substitution. Only martial artists want to duck people (and it—no joke—just now substituted [duck -> suck]. You had one job autocorrect.) Is this just me? Is it actually 2020? What is going on?

godelski 6y ago
This also happens to me on Android. Working in ML, this is something to point to when people hype it up. We've come a long way, but we still got a long way to go. As for specific errors, does rock capitalize when "the" is before it? (The Rock) The models learn from how users write. But when you think about it, it is actually fairly difficult to predict what words are going to be, you can test it with your friends. Have them create a sentence and feed you one word at a time. The better you know the person the better you'll do, but I'm guessing you still won't be that good.
- stefco_ 6y ago
  Predicting subsequent words is hard for humans, but correcting typos is easy. I've turned off autocorrect completely because my typos are always immediately decodable to their human audience, moreso than Apple's seemingly random modifications.
- jointpdf 6y ago
  The most disruptive errors are those that could seemingly be cleaned up with some simple rules (e.g. if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it). This doesn’t seem like a “state of ML” issue—the Gmail text completion is annoyingly good, and you-know-who can compose soliloquies and smut with uncanny skill. And no, I don’t often discuss The Rock, but if I did (“Do you smell what the r...”) I'd expect it to finish the alley-oop. I do not want to go Rock climbing. iMessage is software that is used <Carl Sagan voice> billions and billions of times a day, and half the time it feels like verbal jiu-jitsu (“jiu-hursuit” according to autocorrect just now) with Dory the fish.

majestik 6y ago

> After a brief pause, he added: "I guess the biggest problem I have is that many of our most ambitious products are the ones we can't talk about and so it's a bit of a sales challenge to tell somebody, 'Come and work on the most ambitious thing ever but I can't tell you what it is.'" JG, I don’t think that’s your “biggest problem” - Siri is. Your privacy centric on-device strategy limits your view of user feedback, Google gets a lot of shit wrong but they know how to transmit user data and understand their feedback.

29athrowaway 6y ago

What is AI? Your washer machine and some rice cookers use AI (fuzzy logic) Everything uses AI. A program with an if statement is AI.

Syeposxr 6y ago

It's the decline of Intel and the advancements Apple has made in designing its own processors that I think are really interesting. Having powerful and efficient processors on mobile devices - both laptops and phones - allows Apple to do edge computing in a way other companies haven't been able to, and integrate ML in much more privacy-focused way.

throwaway202020 6y ago

You can't be AI leader when every AI leader is staying away from you by 10ft pole. When Ian Goodfellow joined Apple, there was literally rain of criticism on him from ending his career as researcher to bowing down to money. I don't know of any researcher who does want to have continued research career willing to join Apple. They simply don't allow that kind of freedom or publishing results. While Apple has some strong points in imaging (thanks to their 1000+ people team) and wrist rejection, virtually everything else they do that requires AI sucks and lags behind competition, including, Siri, maps, autocorrect, spell check, iCloud, search, calendar, spam detection, recommendations etc. For most of these things, most people don't even count them as real competition. Google on the other hand is able to achieve very competitive performance through software and AI without such large team on phone camera and frankly quite pathetic hardware. These kind of reality distortion pieces aren't going to help them. They have $100+B, in cash, they can easily start reputable open research lab that can rival FAIR, OpenAI or DeepMind. Even a smaller companies like Intel and Adobe is starting to realize that this is necessary so they can tap into expertise on demand. At minimum that will be totally worth for a talent pipeline that can be motivated to do "rotation" or "sabbaticals" into product groups from an open lab.

bitxbit 6y ago
That’s an interesting take. Does Apple really lag? I think quote-unquote AI in SV has pretty much stalled in the past 3-4 years. There’s been a lot of volume in ML but nothing groundbreaking.
- throwaway202020 6y ago
  That's not true at all. AI is everywhere. When Gmail completes your sentence, auto-playlist gets created, camera detects a pet, you take night shot of a city, grammar suggestions are shown, wrong keystrokes auto-corrects, voice mail is transcribed, phone call is responded by quick text, your sleep is analysed, heart rate is monitored on runs, news articles gets recommended, spam email gets filtered, device idle detected... I can go on. Most of these problems cannot be simply solved by just throwing in best engineers. No amount of classical algorithms you learned as CS major is going to help you implement the best solutions for these problems. The state of art solutions to these problems requires intense narrowly focused researchers who have studied these problems for many years, knows which 10% of the papers even worth looking at and pro/cons of different techniques. Something as benign as running neural net on phone hardware is intensely researched subject and your implementation can be literally 10X to 100X better at speed and power consumption if you have kept up with the field.

lacker 6y ago

"Google is an amazing company, and there's some really great technologists working there," he said. "But fundamentally, their business model is different and they're not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people." What does he mean by this? Google search and Android are both used by more than a billion people. YouTube over 2 billion. These are all bigger than any Apple product. If anything, Google is known for shipping consumer experiences that reach a large number of people. Apple by contrast is known for its high-quality, high-price consumer experiences that reach fewer people.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
He's just being subtle and putting it short of Apple's usual marketing speak - "We chose not to sell Data" perhaps as a goodwill to his former company. Btw, >they're not known for shipping consumer experiences IMO, difference is not in selling 'consumer experiences' but selling 'consumer aspirations', which you rightly pointed out is not for many.
deleted 6y ago
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shrimpx 6y ago
I thought that was odd, too. My best guess is that he’s emphasizing “known” as in notorious. Apple is “that company that ships experiences” whereas google is that company that records you while you use their apps or whatever.
- pas 6y ago
  Is that even true? I mean on HN sure, but in the general population ... I have no idea what's the perception of Google.
m463 6y ago
I would say it slightly different: Google is known for shipping experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people. Unfortunately that model means they have to ignore everyone individually.

OrangeKnucles 6y ago

When it comes to making software, Facebook and Google are the best. Apple is slightly ahead of Samsung :'-D They couldn't even get the launch of Notes app right last year.

pcr910303 6y ago

I like this article. I like Apple’s approach to ML because it blends in. When applied, the feature should not expose that it’s based on ML — that’s a failure. And so Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant are failures. But Face ID, plam rejection are successes. If you have to explain the customers that it’s ML based, that’s the same as asking for the customers to understand it’s unreliability. And unreliable features are worse than no features, and that’s why nobody uses Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant except for a few reliably-working requests.

deleted 6y ago

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hepinhei 6y ago

An interview full of nothing.... When they say Google has no experience shipping user experience used by millions of people

NicoJuicy 6y ago

Don't have iOS. But I do wish that Android with detect the current language you are writing in. I have 3 languages on my keyboard and sometimes it suggests an autocomplete in the wrong language.

Krasnol 6y ago
I have German, English and Polish and it works perfectly.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Not so great with Dutch, French and English though. Weird
  - Krasnol 6y ago
    I was very surprised with how good it actually was for Polish. It's a hard language and not as good covered usually with ML as English or German is.

m3kw9 6y ago

Aside from what they say, they still can’t get their iOS AI based spelling correction up to par.

cromwellian 6y ago

(Googler here) I feel article presents a false dichotomy/view (imho borderline disingenuous impression) that Apple is doing on-device, and everyone else is doing on-cloud. Android also does on-device. A lot of the time, things start out on-cloud, until whatever machine learning model can be shrunk to run on-device at the right performance. So you see for example, text-to-speech and speech-to-text start out as cloud calls, and now they're on-device. Google Translate ran in the cloud, but now for some languages, it happens on-device. Things like Google's "Live Transcription/Caption" on Android wouldn't work if it wasn't on-device. Apple similarly went to the cloud for Siri speech recognition and TTS until they could run it locally. For other things which need large models, there is Federated Learning to preserve privacy. Google Keyboard has been using Federated Learning for some time now.

jml78 6y ago

Did the interviewer not know enough about ML to even challenge the bogus statements. Yes, apple’s strategy is more privacy protecting. But holy hell, yes larger data sets are going to be more accurate and the resultant model doesn’t have to run in the cloud, it can run locally. AI training in a data center with large data sets, ship the model to local devices to execute. That is ALWAYS going to be better and more accurate than what Apple is doing.

bambax 6y ago

> Machine learning is used to help the iPad's software distinguish between a user accidentally pressing their palm against the screen while drawing with the Apple Pencil, and an intentional press meant to provide an input. It's used to monitor users' usage habits to optimize device battery life and charging, both to improve the time users can spend between charges and to protect the battery's longterm viability. It's used to make app recommendations. The problem with machine learning altering the behavior of a device is it shortcuts human learning. The human brain is very good at learning deep insights about things and its environment and alters its behavior accordingly. If things change while we're learning about them, it confuses and upsets us. A dumb machine is much easier to use than a "smart" one.

kumarvvr 6y ago
This might be true for mostly user interface stuff. But for things that are happening under the hood, a human mind will get accustomed to a gradually improving user experience. Apples mantra seems to be to make everyone use the device as per their whims and fancy, and let the device figure out how to deal with it. Ultimately what this leads to is a user experience lock in, where other devices that dont adapt feel clumsy or stupid.

georgespencer 6y ago

I don't know anyone who believes that Siri is as good as Alexa. I spent four months self-isolating in an apartment with the small hockey puck Alexa devices in random corners and returned to my big open plan apartment with two paired HomePods on the kitchen counter. The frequency with which Siri shits its pants (can't help, asks me to excuse it being slow as it tries to set a timer, mishears me, etc.) is honestly remarkable. (Not to mention the fact that my phone continues to alert me to text messages read on my Mac or iPad whole minutes ago.) Apple is still working to overcome deep problems in both its cloud infrastructure and AI/ML. If they cannot be honest about this, they should not be dishonestly trying to present a picture of all being well.

antipaul 6y ago
Apple says they do on-device, so yea, why is Siri "thinking" for 20 seconds when I ask it to set a timer for 10 minutes for the 1000th time

amelius 6y ago

NVidia thinks they're an AI leader too, and they're probably closer to the truth.

lowdose 6y ago

It's like saying you are the smartest girl of the city. When you have to say it yourself you probably aren't.

segmondy 6y ago

Apple is a fashion house. They will be around for quite a while, and still have time to turn things around, but if they keep at their current pace, they will be back to irrelevance in 2 decades. Apple builds beautiful looking hardware. Software wise? Complete garbage.