throwaway202020

What about the photos of people happily seating in groups in restaurants and even attending sports events? I never seen anyone in those photos with masks. Also, I believe schools were kept open at least before summer vacations? I am not living there but very curious about how the life was during COVID period there.

May be it's more fair to count for the months of COVID, March-July. So normal deaths would have been 42,000 during this period but COVID roughly added 10%. While this is still high and non-trivial amount, the fascinating thing is that almost everyone thought they will turn into Wuhan with dead bodies on roads and overflowing hospitals. For virus spread, soft lockdown was considered inconsequential back in March and any country doing nothing but hard lockdown was despised. In US, many people criticized for not having China style lockdown. In my view, Sweden has definitely done something that is worthy of study. I think it will be unfair to go back and say, yeah, soft down was all you needed in retrospect to devalue their achievement and what everyone thought was rather risky bet.

Sweden chart is going downhill at the same rate as other countries with strict lockdown. There is a significant gap in mortality but I think the point is that people initially thought they would explode with COVID cases like early days in Wuhan (i.e. graph will go up, not down). Now it looks like they either have already hit zero new cases or going to hit them very soon. I think this is important fact worthy of studying deeply.

Many teams at Apple are pure junk. When Steve Jobs basically fired iCloud folks in public, lot of people thought he went too far but little they knew how bad that team really was and still is. These folks are now center of the Apple universe but can't build a simple app that can efficiently sync the photos on Windows. Other teams are iTunes (one of the worst widely deployed Windows app ever), Apple Music (just look at the obscene UX - in 2020), App Store (good luck deleting installed app if you have too many of them - in 2020) and of course auto-correct (fails to fix spellings in 2020 that MS Word 2000 used to fix!). Surprisingly these folks have kept up with mediocracy regardless of otherwise stringent culture at Apple.

It would be hard to be leader without having leaders in the field at your disposal. There are literally 20,000 papers getting published each year. While stunning gains are being reported every month, it would be very hard for you to identify good implementable papers with state of the art results unless you are active in the field. Many of the techniques are amalgamation of other dozen techniques. So its even more harder to add/subtract from a given paper to productize the results. Keeping up with these papers and techniques is literally a full time job which is why you need researchers at your disposal if you are working on these problems. Unfortunately, researchers are almost never willing to just give up research and become your next engineering dude. They are in the field because they love research, freedom and can publish. So the viable way is to have a research lab which you can tap into on demand and have options for rotations. Many people believed that this can be done without having your own research lab but that doesn't often work out. If you approach a researcher in academia for consulting, you have to count on them being free from academic duty, grad students and other commitments. They will typically do 80/20. If you have your own research lab, you can turn this around to 20/80.

That's the whole point. If you are still using classical solutions for these things that are years old, you are far behind best experience and the competition. As an example, noise removal in low light images has advanced tremendously each year with stunning gains. Same goes for grammar correction and auto-correct. You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude. Siri even has trouble doing proper voice recognition and as Apple does not even know how to do search, its question answering skills shines only for highly curated tasks. First thing I've always done on my iPhones is to turn it off. However, Google had been amazingly improving these stuff every year. The end result is that while I do use iPhone, I tend to use mostly Google services and when something is only available on Android I get a tremendous itch to switch.

That's not true at all. AI is everywhere. When Gmail completes your sentence, auto-playlist gets created, camera detects a pet, you take night shot of a city, grammar suggestions are shown, wrong keystrokes auto-corrects, voice mail is transcribed, phone call is responded by quick text, your sleep is analysed, heart rate is monitored on runs, news articles gets recommended, spam email gets filtered, device idle detected... I can go on.

Most of these problems cannot be simply solved by just throwing in best engineers. No amount of classical algorithms you learned as CS major is going to help you implement the best solutions for these problems. The state of art solutions to these problems requires intense narrowly focused researchers who have studied these problems for many years, knows which 10% of the papers even worth looking at and pro/cons of different techniques. Something as benign as running neural net on phone hardware is intensely researched subject and your implementation can be literally 10X to 100X better at speed and power consumption if you have kept up with the field.

You can't be AI leader when every AI leader is staying away from you by 10ft pole. When Ian Goodfellow joined Apple, there was literally rain of criticism on him from ending his career as researcher to bowing down to money. I don't know of any researcher who does want to have continued research career willing to join Apple. They simply don't allow that kind of freedom or publishing results. While Apple has some strong points in imaging (thanks to their 1000+ people team) and wrist rejection, virtually everything else they do that requires AI sucks and lags behind competition, including, Siri, maps, autocorrect, spell check, iCloud, search, calendar, spam detection, recommendations etc. For most of these things, most people don't even count them as real competition. Google on the other hand is able to achieve very competitive performance through software and AI without such large team on phone camera and frankly quite pathetic hardware.

These kind of reality distortion pieces aren't going to help them. They have $100+B, in cash, they can easily start reputable open research lab that can rival FAIR, OpenAI or DeepMind. Even a smaller companies like Intel and Adobe is starting to realize that this is necessary so they can tap into expertise on demand. At minimum that will be totally worth for a talent pipeline that can be motivated to do "rotation" or "sabbaticals" into product groups from an open lab.