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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.

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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.

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