Comment by Smerity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Smerity | Hacker News Reader

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None of this really answers the overlying question that Jerry Kaplan and Oren Etzioni raised. The question raised by most in the field isn't whether Apple use AI/ML internally, the real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly.

For me, the greatest thing about the ML/AI community is how open it is and how strong a sense of camaraderie there is between people across the entire field, regardless of whether they're from industry or academia.

Employees from competing companies will meet at a conference and actually discuss methods. Papers are released to disseminate new ideas and as a way of attracting top tier talent. Code is released as a way of pretraining students in the company's stack before they ever step through the company's doors. Papers are published on arXiv when the authors feel they're ready - entirely free to access - without waiting for a conference for their ideas to be spread.

This entire push of camaraderie has accelerated the speed at which research and implementation have progressed for AI/ML.

... but Apple are not part of that. They publish little and more broadly don't have a good track record. On acquiring FoundationDB, they nixed it, with little respect to the existing customers. Fascinating pieces of technology lost. If they aren't using the exact thing internally, why not open source it? I fear the same is likely to happen to Turi, especially sad given the number of customers they had and the previous contributions that many of Turi's researchers made to the community via their published papers.

Apple may change in the future - they may become part of the community - but a vague article of self congratulation isn't going to sway me either direction.

"We have the biggest and baddest GPU farm cranking all the time" ... Really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What makes you think this is self-congratulation? This is a response to Marco Arment, Ben Thompson, and other pundits (largely spurred by the PR efforts of Google and to a lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft) who claim that Apple is "behind" in this field or that it somehow poses an existential threat to Apple. This is Apple saying "uh no".

They'd be perfectly fine with not talking about it as they've done until now if they weren't trying to counter these media narratives.

As to your point about Apple not engaging with the research community, how is this a surprise at all? Their M.O has been secrecy ever since Jobs returned to Apple.

This article lacks any real evidence they're ahead though, which is essentially equivalent to "behind" if (a) the majority of the advances are democratized by your competitors and (b) you lack the ability to attract top tier talent. If AI/ML is an existential threat to Apple, then this article doesn't provide any comfort beyond being a PR puff piece.

The talent war for AI/ML is truly insane. Given that the top researchers and engineers can get similar benefits at other entities, whilst also continuing to publish code and research out in the open, Apple aren't that attractive.

They may try compensating for this via acquisitions but that still leaves a fundamental issue when it comes to long term retention.

As I mentioned before, this is a fairly universal trait. Many come from academia or have open source affiliations / rely on open source tools for their skill set, so the idea of putting their ideas out there to be used, ...

If what AI/ML talent wants is to do research and draw a Silicon Valley salary then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple.

Some people don't want to work at Apple because they can't describe their job on their LinkedIn pages or tell their friends and family about what they do. Others don't like that they have to buy their own meals at Caffe Macs. I don't think Apple worries about this too much.

What they do worry about is finding people that fit Apple's culture and want to work on products used by hundreds of millions of people.

In any case, being perceived or not to be at the top of the field and being able/unable to hire the best ML/AI talent isn't an existential threat. ML/AI isn't magic, it's a technology. If there's one thing that the tech industry should have learned from Steve Jobs, it's that you make good products by working backward to the technology. In that respect, what Federighi mentioned about not having a ML/AI division was reassuring.

> If what AI/ML talent wants is to do research and draw a Silicon Valley salary then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple.

Let me simplify that further: "If what AI/ML talent wants is to publish...then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple". Money may or may not be a factor, but Apples secrecy won't allow the talent to publish their research. Given that AI is highly driven by research right now (no "if" about it), what talent would want to work somewhere where they can't publish research papers?

"what talent would want to work somewhere where they can't publish research papers?"

There are lot of people out there who don't particularly merit the publish-or-perish ethos of academia and would rather publish only after they have something worthwhile to publish and not just footnotes to an established scheme.

E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/14/higgs-...

and so on.

> Given that AI is highly driven by research right now (no "if" about it), what talent would want to work somewhere where they can't publish research papers?

Ehh. I would question that doing research is necessarily highly correlated with wanting to publish papers all the time. A lot of the work during product development is a mix of AI, UX and engineering. The entire output might definitely fall in research but the individual components of it might require way more fleshing out to bring each to publishable quality. Considering that we don't particularly have the publish or perish doctrine of academia, we are not particularly forced to publish at the same rate as there.

I agree with your implicit assumption -- that the talent and PR battle is motivating this article -- but disagree with your assertion that secrecy makes Apple unattractive to ML talent.

You're weighting open publishing very heavily, but others may have different weighting functions. The ability to interact with device makers may be convincing to some, or maybe others like the Apple company and culture, or Apple's privacy stance.

Criticizing the article as PR or boasting is true, but somewhat beside the point, because most of the players in this field have always -- for decades -- had a tendency to PR and boasting. Admittedly, proofs-of-concept like AlphaGo do provide substance behind the boasting, but they have a definite PR element too.

Funny, how it's a "response" from Apple and yet a PR effort from their competitors. FYI, it's a PR effort.

"This is a response to Marco Arment, Ben Thompson, and other pundits (largely spurred by the PR efforts of Google and to a lesser extent Facebook and Microsoft)"

It may not be self-congratulation, but this sentence is definitely unsubstantiated slander.

Some companies engage academia, many others do not. I find it very surprising how willing companies like Microsoft and Google are to let their best and brightest invest in publishing. I get the long term benefit, but in most companies secrecy is the default.

To me it's much more surprising that Apple and other companies refuse to allow publishing. Anyone in AI who wants to continue to be recognized in and remain friends with others in the field and advance their career should absolutely refuse to go anywhere like Apple, unless they plan to stay at that one company their entire life. It's amazing how frustrating it is trying to talk to Apple employees at conferences -- at this point I pretty much avoid it if possible.

A friend of mine work in medical drugs research. Secrecy is definitely the norm in this field and they even prefer to keep formula in a safe than publish a patent, because they think patent system is not protective enough to get they R&D money back.

Now that all come down to the same old paradox. The current patent system encourage patent troll and discourage real innovators to publish because they are too easily copied.

One alternative is open source, but when huge R&D costs are involved it's maybe not the best idea. I think Apple is currently doing a great mix, they work on some project with OpenSource (WebKit, Swift) were community feedback is important... and they keep innovative R&D technics under secrecy to monetize them.

[voluntarily removed]

His blog post was the direct result of Google I/O.

> The question raised by most in the field isn't whether Apple use AI/ML internally, the real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly.

I'm not sure why this is a "big deal" or even much of anything. Apple has always done this. Even their work on WebKit they were not always "there" with the community. This is how Apple has always worked, why would it be any different with AI / ML?

> For me, the greatest thing about the ML/AI community is how open it is and how strong a sense of camaraderie there is between people across the entire field, regardless of whether they're from industry or academia.

You get this in every field but there are also a ton of players out there not going. Just like Apple there are plenty of companies hard at work on various AI initiatives who are also not going to said events.

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. Does anyone really care Apple doesn't give away free time / knowledge to people?

> Just like Apple there are plenty of companies hard at work on various AI initiatives who are also not going to said events.

So what are these companies doing? Linear regression in excel? I don't see any of them beating Go players or building self-driving cars.

> Does anyone really care Apple doesn't give away free time / knowledge to people?

End users, no. Engineers and researchers, yes. Who builds the products the end users love? Engineers and researchers.

>I don't see any of them beating Go players or building self-driving cars.

Because they aren't telling the world. On a lesser scale, CMU was building self driving cars for years before Google decided to step up the PR and tell everyone self driving cars were possible.

There's a big difference between driving in a controlled environment or track versus driving on the street in numbers, where it can pose real danger to people.

Google's self driving cars in one of the most advanced use of technology I've seen. It's borderline magic in our time.

Edit: removed "give credit where it's due". You weren't withholding that, apologies.

> So what are these companies doing?

Uh, well, what are the use cases for AI / ML? That's what they're doing. They're using it all over the place. It's almost unheard of to find a small tech company not at least exploring ML to see if they can use it to gain an edge.

Why do they have to detail what they're doing so they're not automatically bucketed into the "doing linear regression in excel" camp?

> Engineers and researchers, yes. Who builds the products the end users love? Engineers and researchers.

Funny, these same practices at Apple for the past 40 years haven't turned engineers and researchers off from working there. It isn't turning them off now, either. Apple has never had to give away time and knowledge for free to attract talent. In fact most companies don't need to do this. Relatively speaking only a few companies do this.

Seems a bit entitled, in my opinion, to think technology companies have to give away their time and expertise. They're going to attract talent if they're interesting / create interesting things as a company.

>the real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly.

Along the same vein, does Apple even employ any 'brand-name' researchers? From what I've seen, all they do is take research invented somewhere else and just apply it. I think Alex Acero is the biggest recognizable researcher that Apple employs.

So to answer your question, they don't publish and don't attend conferences because they simply don't have many researchers on board.

"real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly."

I think it's within their DNA.

They are a very secretive company for a lot of historical reasons.

Company culture is what companies are ... they are the social rules built into the organization that are very difficult to change once established.

Apple is within their moral right to do what they are doing. There are different approaches taken by other companies so it's healthy to have that.

If this were weapons systems or cancer cures, I might have a different opinion.

>>They are a very secretive company for a lot of historical reasons.

It's true, they saw what happened to Xerox PARC's ground-breaking UI work...

Every companies copy other companies innovations.

Smartphones would not exist unless BlackBerry created the market for them.

But they are secretive not for that reason - they are secretive because they want to announce and present things on their own terms. They don't want leakage pre-product.

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