How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
None of this really answers the overlying question that Jerry Kaplan and Oren Etzioni raised. The question raised by most in the field isn&#x27;t whether Apple use AI&#x2F;ML internally, the real question is why they avoid the research community so strongly.<p>For me, the greatest thing about the ML&#x2F;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&#x27;re from industry or academia.<p>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&#x27;s stack before they ever step through the company&#x27;s doors.
Papers are published on arXiv when the authors feel they&#x27;re ready - entirely free to access - without waiting for a conference for their ideas to be spread.<p>This entire push of camaraderie has accelerated the speed at which research and implementation have progressed for AI&#x2F;ML.<p>... but Apple are not part of that. They publish little and more broadly don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s researchers made to the community via their published papers.<p>Apple may change in the future - they may become part of the community - but a vague article of self congratulation isn&#x27;t going to sway me either direction.<p>&quot;We have the biggest and baddest GPU farm cranking all the time&quot; ... Really? ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯