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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

I think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up. Their bet will be that consumers are privacy-focused enough to not mind the fact that their products have less AI-focused advancements (e.g. Google Photos).

At the end of the day, the only way AI systems currently train themselves is if a lot of users share their data, like Google-users do. Apple provides more of a firewall, but handicaps potential AI systems from using training data in doing so.

Also Google has massive mindshare in the AI community with TensorFlow.

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I use both Google Photos and Apple Photos and honestly, most of the "suggestions" from Google Photos are uncompelling. When I switched back to iOS a few months ago, I didn't find anything keeping me from moving primarily to Apple's solution. The most impressive automatic-photos-adjustment thing I've seen is in Lightroom now - and Adobe wouldn't be my first guess for AI leader.

I find this to be a general trend with Google: they may have more advanced AI, but haven't yet figured out super-useful ways to apply it.

They also are perfectly willing to undercut their own AI to serve business goals: the Assistant on my Pixel wouldn't even let me do "hey google set a timer for five minutes" if I didn't give Google my full location history. Because you need that to set timers...

OK I guess we have a different experience. As an iPhone user who uses Google Photos I find it to be quite a lot ahead of Apple's solution. It isn't really the filters it's more the search feature. I can search for "pets with children" and it will give me accurate results. Apple doesn't come close.

That would explain it. I do my photo browsing by time, not by search.

I've _tried_ searching in Google Photos before, it just didn't work reliably enough for me try it more frequently (usually searching for more specific stuff than something like "pets with children," though I can't recall any exact examples right now). Searching for location works well, but that's not very hard.

Anecdata, perhaps, but I have noticed that Google's photo searching by content has greatly improved as of late. Searches that failed for me around Christmas of last year now work perfectly.

For me, the killer ML use case in Google Photos is object recognition.

For example, I took a picture of my driver's license a year or so ago, and needed the number on a form recently. I just went to Google Photos and searched for "driver's license." Sure enough, the old picture showed up, even though I never manually tagged it.

The same is done in the photos app on iOS and macOS, all locally on device. I don’t have a picture of a drivers license, but I just tried “license plate” and “receipt” and both brought back all relevant results.

Which is mostly useless when you have only 20GB of storage.

OTOH, if I ask Google Photos to show me pictures of me on the beach with my friends X and Y, it shows me a picture from 2005, of exactly what I asked. (literally "me on the beach with X and Y").

And if I ask for pictures of me and my friend Z in a party, it shows me pictures of me at Z's wedding 4 years ago. (literally "me with Z in a party").

Assume you mean the 20GB limitation being iCloud storage? Both iOS and macOS Photos can “optimize photos storage” and will build index of full library without needing to keep photos on device after they’re analyzed / indexed.

Luckily iPhones 7 and up have up to 256GB of storage

Which photos seems to think is full whatever I do.

Yep, I did this exact same thing and was pleasantly surprised it was able to pull up my passport photo.

Don't you carry your driver's license in your wallet? It's just weird to me that someone would think "I need my driver's license number, so I'll search through an online photo archive."

I’m not OP, but I’ve had similar experiences. I don’t carry my license in my wallet because I live in a foreign country where my license is useless (we have a different form of government ID), but I do still need it for occasional administrivia back home.

You should try Adobe's iPad apps. They use AI enhancements very wisely throughout this ecosystem.

Some logic (be it faulty or not) brought me to wonder; isn't Google's lead in AI a direct result of sitting on figuratively all the data in the world?

That must account for a huge portion of their advances, right?

Their advance is because they have two geeks at the helm that have been dreaming to have AI to respond to search queries since pretty much the beginning of the company.

Yes, the most data and the best AI people together means Google is always miles ahead IMO.

> I think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up.

We are so early on in the AI revolution, it seems very premature to make this claim.

I would wager we can't even imagine the scope of the kind of data we'd have available in the coming decades, let alone how the latest AI tech will use it, or which company will lead the way with its application.

> I think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up.

That’s been used to describe every dominant technology company at some point, most of which have been supplanted by now (or else supplanted a company which was previously described in similar terms). Maybe this time it’s true—and Apple certainly has their work cut out for them—but history implies that it’s probably not. Maybe it won’t be Apple, but it’ll probably be somebody.

"I think Microsoft is so many years behind Google in search that they have little hope of catching up"

I can think of more examples.

I agree, and Microsoft is a good example, that a paradigm shift can totally change the playing field. A desktop software oriented company like Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't take their dominance into an internet oriented market.

However Google has managed to transition to mobile and demonstrated they can manage such changes.

From what I've seen of fuchsia they're thinking ahead again.

I'm not sure MS vs Google in search is a good example, since by and large many people still have the impression that Bing isn't very good.

Last time I used it, this was the case. I don't know if it's changed, I'd be willing to believe either way.

Bing's general search still lags Google's, but its image search is miles ahead. IMO.

+1 for bing image search is incredible

I don't think this is true. I do specialize in ML and you are probably talking about neural networks ("deep learning"). While they do require a lot of data for most tasks, it's still finite and after a certain size the improvements are not significant anymore (the definition of significant is up to you..). I don't know what Apple is working on, but i think for most of the ML-applications they are interested in, getting the training data is not that hard (like suggestions on the photos-app or autocorrect). It's still apple.

If I remember correctly, sharing analytics info etc. with apple is opt-in? If 1% of the users share the relevant data (or you've got money for annotating data in asia/africa, like tesla), this might enable you to solve most of your problems.

this does not mean that the quality of apples solutions is the same as googles, i just doubt it's the training data. Google is A LOT (not even comparable) more visible in the ML-community and i bet they have better and more researchers.

Not disagreeing with you that Google has advantages in some areas. However, Apple has some advantages as well, especially in its hardware/software integration in end user devices, which allows it to deploy e.g. hardware neural network acceleration or specific sensors, as in the iPhone X.

Is your background in AI/machine learning? Because it is a very common trope that is rolled out and I strongly disagree with it. There isn’t such a thing as an insurmountable lead.

Given the public desire to make AI largely open source - which Apple could easily bankroll and gain goodwill while doing it - I'd say the odds of catching up are fairly good. Not necessarily over 50%, but probably better than it would look from counting patents.

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