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Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

This headline doesn't include the most important information. Russ was part of the big bang in deep learning about 10 years ago when he was Geoff Hinton's student. His name is on the 2006 papers about RBMs.[0] CMU is a great school, but Russ is not a random guy from CMU. He's a deep learning veteran who's done a lot of important work, which makes this a huge hire for Apple. They were lacking a marquee name for their AI team, and now they have it, and that's probably going to accelerate their recruiting and product development.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf

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A marque name may be useful for Wall Street or the media but it seems unlikely it will help them recruit, for two reasons.

1) Machine Learning is one of the most quickly advancing fields of learning today, maybe ever. Having discovered a lot ten years ago likely isn't as important as what you have done now. The importance of the machine learning people that do AMAs on reddit (Lacune etc) is that they lead teams of people now who are working with streams of big data now, publishing state of the art results now. Which brings the second point...

2) Machine learning has advanced to its situation by being an incredibly open field, with arxive being the default repository for publications. Just doing this hire doesn't give any indication that Apple has relaxed its posture of restricting all information coming out of its research. This closed-to-publication position makes them much more unattractive to cutting-edge machine learning researchers than the presence of a single big name researcher could make them attractive.

(and I'm no cutting edge researcher myself, just an observer but I think you can find similar comments from real researchers in places)

This is fair, but as we've seen with their recent approach to Swift, Apple's shown it's at least possible for them to pursue a more open approach.

I'd like to think Maps and Siri have been a huge wake-up call to them that you can't apply the same closed-door approach to product development when your product require mountains of data to provide a good user experience. Then again, time will tell.

I wonder if they are thing the same thing along the lines of the Stratechery article pointing out the differing cultures required for services vs. devices. It may signal some sort of pivot, at least for their icloud based things, especially w/ the recent news of a reorg putting their services people all under a single roof/organization...

> The importance of the machine learning people that do AMAs on reddit (Lacune etc) [...]

I assume you're referring to LeCun?

While I think you make valid points in general, they don't apply here for two reasons:

1) Russ has continued to do relevant and interesting work in the decade since those papers with Hinton. Here's his arXiv feed. The latest was in June 2016 I think.

https://arxiv.org/find/cs/1/au:+Salakhutdinov_R/0/1/0/all/0/...

2) Russ will keep his position at CMU, which means that he will continue to engage in interesting work that can be shared. I'm not sure how Apple's position on open-ness is evolving, and I'm not incredibly optimistic that they'll let people share their work, but Russ will keep one foot in the open community.

I think if Apple wanted to enhance its recruiting in machine learning, it would have to visibly change its openness. So far it has not done that.

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