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Comment by CogDisco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 ...

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