Narrative: Apple is Behind in AI
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Apple Officially Joins Partnership on AI (Jan 27, 2017)
I commented on the reports that Apple was about to join the Partnership on AI yesterday, so I won’t revisit all of this today. Two notable things from today’s announcement, though: Apple’s representative will be Tom Gruber, who runs Siri at Apple, and that may be indicative of where Apple sees ownership of AI residing within the company (it has no formal head of AI); secondly, Apple has been involved with the Partnership from the outset, but hadn’t formalized its membership until today. That might signify that there were some details of Apple’s membership which needed to be worked out before it felt comfortable joining -I’d love to know what those were. Separately from Apple’s involvement, it’s worth noting that the board now has representatives from a number of other organizations beyond tech companies including several universities. So the Partnership won’t just be about driving the agenda of the tech industry here.
Apple Set to Join Amazon, Google, Facebook in AI Research Group – Bloomberg (Jan 26, 2017)
This would be a fascinating development – Apple has very rarely been part of such groups in the past, often a holdout among major tech companies. But it does seem to be taking AI very seriously at this point, and seems also to be taking steps to help current and potential employees feel they can continue to contribute in the industry beyond Apple’s walls, including allowing employees to publish research and potentially now joining this group. It’s also worth noting that AI, perhaps more than any other major technology currently being developed, has massive ethics implications, and ethics and related issues are a major focus of the group. Apple may feel that it needs to be both contributing to and learning from others in the field when it comes to these non-technical issues.
via Bloomberg (more on Techmeme)
Is Amazon late to the mobile voice assistant game? – iMore (Jan 11, 2017)
This is satire and opinion, but it’s very relevant to two prevailing narratives – that Apple is behind in AI and that Amazon is ahead in voice. Rene’s piece here does a good job of framing the discussion, and the two essays on this site which I just linked to take a similar stance: Amazon is very good at what it does with Echo, but it does a very limited number of things, and for today still does them mostly in the home. Siri has two orders of magnitude more users, but also gives users a variety of other ways to interact with their device. Any analysis that doesn’t take into account those factors when comparing the two is insufficient.
via Is Amazon late to the mobile voice assistant game?!?! | iMore
Why Apple’s Critics Are Right This Time – WSJ (Jan 8, 2017)
This piece rehashes all the recent stuff that’s been said about Apple without really adding anything new. AI is mentioned a few times, and that’s the ostensible focus, though it’s not clear that AI is really what’s meant – it’s mostly about voice assistants specifically, and this article repeats a lot of the prevailing narrative about Amazon being ahead in voice, a situation that’s significantly more nuanced in reality. But in some ways the key point here is that we’re starting to see a steady drumbeat of this kind of thing lately, and that’s notable in its own right.
via Why Apple’s Critics Are Right This Time – WSJ
Apple Publishes Its First Artificial Intelligence Paper (Dec 26, 2016)
Apple announced at a conference a few weeks ago that it would begin allowing its AI researchers to publish, a move intended to attract those in the field for whom this is standard practice. This is also part of Apple’s broader push to establish its AI credentials, countering the popular narrative that it’s behind big competitors like Google and Microsoft.
via Apple Publishes Its First Artificial Intelligence Paper
America’s Big 5 tech companies increase patent filings, Microsoft holds lead in AI technologies – IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law (Dec 22, 2016)
Interesting and valuable analysis. But clearly an oversimplification to make patents held the arbiter of a “lead” in AI. Ultimately, whether you lead in AI comes down to the customer benefit you drive from it, not the patents themselves.
Apple will break with tradition and start publishing AI research – The Verge (Dec 6, 2016)
This is a big policy change for Apple, whose famous penchant for secrecy has hampered its efforts to hire and retain top AI researchers. We won’t see future Apple products and services leaked through this research, obviously – it will either be generalized enough to offer no clues, or will be published after the related consumer-facing products are released. But it should help ease the hiring challenges somewhat and neutralize one of the frequent criticisms of Apple’s AI efforts.
via Apple will break with tradition and start publishing AI research – The Verge