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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I like how Apple can't win here.

If they publish, they aren't doing anything new and they haven't innovated since Steve died, and they should really just give up because there's obviously no point to anything they do and hasn't been since 1997.

If they don't publish, they're evil secretive bastards who don't contribute to the ML community and probably drown puppies or something because who knows what goes on behind closed doors?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, except inasmuch as I'm a generally satisfied iPhone owner. I just think it would be really neat if people would settle on one narrative or the other, instead of keeping on with both at once.

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If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims. Papers, source code, numbers. Not "we have the biggest, baddest GPU farm" and refuse to say any more as policy. Under this veil of secrecy and doubletalk, all they have is marketing: Trust the brand rather than objective reality.

Many other companies are mature enough to show their cards but Apple keeps declaring victory. Apple writes its own narrative instead of participating.

There are mature ways for this to shake out and they don't include your strawman dichotomy.

> If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims. Papers, source code, numbers. Not "we have the biggest, baddest GPU farm" and refuse to say any more as policy.

But why? Who cares about papers, source code or numbers beyond the tiny segment that HN caters to? Apple has always been about the user experience. When they discuss a vast majority of prior accomplishments they discuss them, many times, in terms of the layman. Does that mean they can't manufacture? Nope. AI is simply harder to show without the papers / source code you mention but this isn't typical Apple to release that.

I honestly don't think they care to go beyond the level of details outlined here. I interviewed with the Siri team twice now and they certainly have some incredibly smart people. Whether they're "winning" against Google, Microsoft or whoever? I say who cares. They want to control their narrative without divulging too much detail like they have always done.

> But why? Who cares about papers, source code or numbers beyond the tiny segment that HN caters to?

I don't know, say, the thousands of future engineers and researchers, that, you know, make the product?

Yes. That tiny segment.

In my mind, this article is squarely aimed at that segment. They are trying to tell one of the most competitive labor markets in the world, AI developers, that they're hiring, but more importantly, that they're doing interesting things.

> I don't know, say, the thousands of future engineers and researchers, that, you know, make the product?

Apple hasn't needed to do that with engineers and researchers pretty much ever; now with AI it's different? Maybe it won't help attract some small portion of people but I'm not sure why it supposedly matters now where it hasn't in the past.

N=1, but as an Engineer I don't care about publishing studies, research and whatnot. I care about creating useful/extremely easy to use products that solve real pain points. The lack of AI/ML papers or research posted by Apple doesn't make me think less of applying for them upon finishing my graduate work. They're a great company to work for, and are most assuredly doing some massively cool stuff with their AI/ML development.

+1 Apple doesn't have a great relationship with open source community and that should not discredit them of innovating and trying the use AI, ML, NN in the products. I think even by being closed source, they still are pushing the envelope by inspiring us and their competetion.

They can put out as many PR pieces as they want, but if they want to be judged on their public accomplishments, they're losing. If we're strictly judging UX, in ML areas, they're behind. Google's speech recognition is superior, Google's automated photo organization is superior, and Google Now is superior to Siri.

>> "If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims."

Why do they need to? At the end of the day all that matters is that the products they ship are good and aren't lacking compared to competitors. The only reason they would provide evidence for what they claim other than that is to appease people calling bullshit and unless it's effecting sales no company should stoop to that.

A lot of their products are lacking though. Maps is awful. So is Safari.

That's a fairly strange reason to question their machine learning claims

Apart from traffic data, where Google is slightly better, maps has been fine for me on ios9 and is better on 10. Apple even learned from the errors they made with the initial launch and have these big open betas for a reason.

Safari is perfect for my use cases. Way better battery life, feels lighter than chrome, etc, etc.

What exactly in your opinion is worse about modern safari and maps that makes a worse experience for the user?

Safari is my browser of choice and I have no issues with it (I much prefer it over Chrome). Maps has occasional issues but it's a solid product now. I use it for walking and transit directions and can't remember the last time I had to fall back on Google Maps.

Same here. Maps works when I'm three quarters blasted, trying to get to a train station I have no idea how to find from a bar I've never been to before, and that has to count as some kind of win.

It's taken me way out of the way, and through a toll bridge when that was not even close to the best way to go. Safari is bad because it's behind the times, and doesn't keep up with standards. Makes it really annoying to have to wait to use certain features because IE and Safari can't keep up.

You blame Safari for not being Chrome? I mean, OK, I guess, but there are a lot of browsers that aren't Chrome. Why single out Safari for vitriol?

(And I'm not even going to touch the frankly invidious IE comparison.)

Chrome and Firefox and Opera all keep up. Safari is worse than IE/Edge at this point in terms of implementing standards. It's the absolute worst because it's not even available for anything but Apple products now so it's a pain in the ass to test.

IE is dead. Edge is embryonic. I can't speak for Opera. I use Firefox every day, both as my personal browser and as my primary development target, with validation in other browsers performed via automated and manual testing. And, if Chrome is your standard, Firefox cannot honestly be said to "keep up". It's consistently a few versions behind, at least, in supporting major innovations which reliably appear first in Chrome.

I grant testing is an issue if you don't own Apple hardware, although there are free and inexpensive remote testing services which cover that need well, and I'm certainly not about to say that Safari doesn't pose any unique difficulties to the web developer. But so does every other browser.

I'm a firefox user as well, and it's both my personal browser and development target. Safari is the only browser that consistently gives me issues.

> Safari is bad because it's behind the times, and doesn't keep up with standards

Safari and WebKit has 100% support for ES6, which is more than any other browser - http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

I think what you mean is Safari doesn't support the standards you want it to support, some of which aren't actually full standards yet but candidates.

hahahaha. Such bullshit. You're talking about Safari 10 which is in beta & no one actually uses. Look at 8 & 9. Much worse than any browser not named IE 11, and 8 is only marginally better. Seriously, i'm glad they're coming out with an up to date version, but it's been far too long in coming.

Down voted but no rebuttal. typical.

Just the other week I realized that I hadn't launched Google Maps in something like 2 years so I finally deleted it.

It's generally helpful if you don't trot out 2-3 year old claims. Both maps and Safari have had massive changes recently and both are if not on par with other companies it's really close. Apple has had issues with OS X reliability and music can be truly bad at times and iCloud (especially sync) is almost embarrassing. I'm a huge Apple fan and an iOS developer but they aren't without fault but if you are going to call them out make it current.

Curious about your take on iCloud sync. Is that from a developer perspective (I remember the API initially sucked) or user perspective? I've never implemented iCloud sync in an app but at least with Apple's apps it works perfectly for me. I moved thousands of notes from Evernote to Notes which I use daily, I use calendars/contacts, I use Reading List, the credit card and password sync for Safari works really well. In the past there were definitely problems but I haven't come across any in quite a long time.

Mostly from a developer side but a little from a user stand point. Parts of iCloud are pretty great, especially cloudkit, but sync itself is really hard to manage and have it work correctly. I've found it fairly common to have a decent amount the production support issues related to iCloud. That being said it's getting better IMO and I think once iOS 10 and Sierra are the default OS's it will be less of an issue.

Common problems include items not syncing, syncing out of time order, and conflict resolution causing synced data to appear lost. Most devs that are really serious about sync tend to roll their own after experiencing enough issues to make iCloud not worth the effort.

This is entirely based on my experience and may not be universally true but I've heard enough devs repeat my own complaints to feel like it's not completely out for left field.

"If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims."

I disagree - they are not making any claims that they care to be validated. They don't care to be 'known as #1' in whatever field. We can believe what we want as far as they are concerned.

'If they are serious' - they will make this technology work to make better experiences for end consumers.

'The proof is in the pudding' - so to speak.

I for one don't doubt that their AI 'increased the intelligence of Siri'. But I also don't care about Siri and find it basically useless. AI has different kinds of impacts in different domains. If they make better experiences for us - all the power to them. If not, then not ...

> I like how Apple can't win here.

They have themselves to blame, at least partially since they painted themselves into a corner. A while back they went on a media offensive proclaiming how "data-mining" the user's information is bad, and they won't stand for it in the interest of privacy... As it turns out, reality is a little more nuanced, and a bit of applied AI is in fact good for the user experience. e.g. your phone can't tell you were you parked your car unless it knows your location, and when you stopped driving.

I see this article as Apple PR rolling back on the previous position which inadvertently made Apple look like a company being overtaken by recent technological developments.

I'm not so sure you actually read the article.

It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy. And that the fact that they deny AI researchers big hoards of data, hurts their reputation in the AI community, because most AI researchers want mountains of data.

> It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy.

My question are: A. who is violating user's privacy, B. How is Apple any different[1] from them, besides proclaiming they aren't violating privacy?

1. Some data is collected from the device and sent to a server for processing. Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device), they are just like every other company that opens up user's data to 'ex-filtration' by third parties.

Well, to your point B: for a start, I've already paid Apple. They have much less financial incentive to use my data in ways inimical to me than, say, an advertising company would.

They're certainly not the only ones in this space, but they've been talking about differential privacy recently[1]. So there are possibilities between "everything is on our server" and "everything is on your device".

[1]: http://www.recode.net/2016/6/24/11967188/apple-data-collecti...

> Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device)

This is exactly what Apple does, which should answer question B.

> This is exactly what Apple does

That is not true, even the puff-piece article admits as much if you read it carefully. This can be proven trivially: is Siri processed locally?

Answering only the trivially erroneous objection, and ignoring two other better-founded ones, does not reflect confidence in your stance.

In the footnote to the point gp was replying, I had said

> Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device)

You can call it trivial, I will argue otherwise. No one knows outside of Apple how big a percentage cloud-based processing is, but my point remains - Apple's does what everyone else is doing, the only difference is proportion.

> I just think it would be really neat if people would settle on one narrative or the other

Let's start with Apple's narrative. Throughout the piece, there is no direct quote mentioning any Apple innovation. The quotes are actually fairly weak:

“We’ve been seeing over the last five years a growth of this inside Apple”

“I loved [publishing at Microsoft Research] and published many papers. But when Siri came out I said this is a chance to make these deep neural networks all a reality”

“Speech is an excellent example where we applied stuff available externally to get it off the ground.”

What I get from it is that Apple has started following Google's, Microsoft's and Facebook's lead in the past five years, and has a few knowledgeable employees reusing and combining algorithms published in papers from other companies or academia.

But fundamentally, the reason they perform this PR is to start being viewed as knowledgeable in the field, so that when they release self-driving cars in 2017 or 2018, the public trusts them.

And to let us know that they're hiring: “Though today we certainly hire many machine learning people, we also look for people with the right core aptitudes and talents.” The hint is not subtle.

> if people

Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position (generally satisfied iphone owner). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not everybody is satisfied with "good enough" isn't a reason to silence discussion. Particularly when as a brand they're pitched as high end rather than just good enough.

Vigorous discussion isn't an unqualified good. If it goes somewhere, sure. But discussions on HN of Apple's business activities seem rarely at best to do that. I don't understand why the light:heat ratio in this kind of thread is so low, and usually I keep my mouth shut about it, but today the urge to say something overmastered my self-discipline on the matter. I don't pretend that my comments here constitute any more of a contribution to worthwhile discourse than anyone else's do.

I'd venture that it's probably because Apple don't encourage discussion. As demonstrated in this article and pointed out by other commenters there's a large veil of secrecy that comes down when it comes to detailing specifics, which is all well and good when things are working, but when it isn't what you're faced with is marketing bluster and iron fisted PR. I'll reiterate once more, that for a company that continually touts itself as "top end" just isn't good enough.

People aren't just one person, they have diverging opinions. You can't expect everyone to settle on one narrative. Plus, you know, trolls.

It basically happens to every company, nothing to be sad about.

Please get over it already. Steve jobs was just one man in the company of thousands, sure he was their leader but someone else will step up for him and I'm sure the company has many brilliant minds within who are still trying to innovate. Let's give Apple some slack and stop crying about Steve Jobs.

There is only one way to win and that is to publish. Innovation in this field doesn't happen in a vacuum but by multiple simpler components combine in ever more emerging complexity.

Perhaps they seek to win a game other than the one you have in mind.

I don't think there are any other game to win for a company like Apple.

Is it possible that this thought does not accurately reflect the reality of the matter?

Sure but I doubt it.

Any company who want to win in the long run will have to take control of machine learning as a central part of their culture.

Which would appear to be what this article describes them doing.

Apple can free ride on other people publishing and synthesise in house. The field might lose out (but there are always free riders) but does Apple?

> The field might lose out (but there are always free riders) but does Apple?

Yes - those in the field who prefer to publish will not be willing to join Apple. How much of an opportunity cost this is to Apple remains an open question.

In the article, Apple spun that as an advantage.

> “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi.

And I think they may be right. Researchers often aren't the best product creators.

> Researchers often aren't the best product creators.

You NEED researchers to build a robust autonomous vehicle or speech recognition system. Hell, you know how many electrical and materials scientists they have working on the iPhone?

Physical products actually requires science and research. Designing a responsive landing page does not.

You need people who understand the science but whose primary focus is developing the product, not developing new theory.

Edison and Ford vs Einstein and Faraday.

> “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,”

This is a blatantly false dichotomy: there's nothing about publishing that precludes anyone from "working as a team to deliver a great product"

> Researchers often aren't the best product creators.

Tell that to Andrew Ng!

Andrew Ng is a great example.

He's made enormous contributions to human knowledge, but doesn't seem to be interested in the hard work of bringing a product to market.

He even left Coursera to return to theory.

> He's made enormous contributions to human knowledge, but doesn't seem to be interested in the hard work of bringing a product to market.

what exactly do you define as "the hard work of bringing a product to market"? To me, his work at Google certainly applies as bringing a product to market - the cat recognition deeplearning AI is a product.

To me, recognizing cats isn't a very useful product; that's just a demonstration of the technology.

That led to an interesting paper and a lot of potential applications.

By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications.

"recognizing cats" isn't a product at all - the AI behind it is the product, albeit barebones. I've heard folk on HN call such a thing an "MVP".

> By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications

I'll have to disagree - "perfecting the product" is one of many roles required to bring a product to market. Other roles that are just as important are "dreamer/visionary", "practical starter/founder", "scale-up person". Sometimes one person can assume multiple roles, but rarely all roles, all of them are hard work.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the AI behind it". A particular model, the theory, the hardware, or something else?

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