Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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