
Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief - ninkendo
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-googles-ai-chief.html
======
minimaxir
It's worth noting that Apple does a lot more with AI than just Siri. See the
latest updates to Core ML: [https://developer.apple.com/machine-
learning/](https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/)

Machine learning comes up atleast once-a-keynote, so it's not surprising to
see a high-profile hire in the area.

~~~
jd20
Heck, they've been doing machine learning since at least 2004, when they added
Latent Semantic Analysis for junk mail filtering to the Mail app. And does
anybody remember iTunes Genius (collaborative filtering on your playlists in
the cloud)?

I think Apple has traditionally done a really good job of keeping the
technology used under wraps, for better or worse.

~~~
chiph
Did Genius use AI? I thought it was more of a collaborative filtering feature
where it used other people's playlists to build relationships between songs.

~~~
hueving
Congrats, you just described all of modern AI!

~~~
lloeki
Do Bayes/Kalman filters count as (super simplistic) A.I. somehow?

~~~
wodenokoto
Yes.

The only reason why machine learning was not called AI, is because funding for
research into AI dried up in the AI winter.

Recently Google decided to revive the AI term, and here we are.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
It always bugs me when people throw AI buzzword around when they are talking
about machine learning.

------
dpflan
Add to mix the news about Jeff Dean:

Jeff Dean takes over as Google’s AI chief (theverge.com) -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353)

~~~
nunez
That makes a lot of sense. He's been doing crazy AI stuff for a long time.

------
zitterbewegung
I don't know who is in a worse position. Apple has the problem of a possible
trade war. Google on the other hand is going to be regulated with GDPR and
whatever the current administration will have to pass due to Facebook. I think
I am leaning toward Google having a worse situation due to this move.

~~~
gman83
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.

~~~
majormajor
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...

~~~
kcorbitt
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.

~~~
DeRock
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.

~~~
ucaetano
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").

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

~~~
lostlogin
Which photos seems to think is full whatever I do.

------
mikehines
Can someone share the A.I. background of John Giannandrea? I read his LinkedIn
profile and couldn't quite see his strength in the field.

~~~
apsec112
He doesn't have an AI background, although I'm sure he's picked up some stuff
over the last few years. Google made him head of a bunch of different things
because of his project management skills. (I used to work in his department.)

~~~
hiddencost
Huh? He founded metaweb out of his PhD, which became the knowledge graph at
Google, and is one of the most successful symbolic AI projects in history.

~~~
kolpa
Symbolic AI is 20th Century AI.

~~~
hiddencost
Publish some papers in major conferences / journals, ship a few projects to
more than 100M people, and get back to me, ok?

~~~
freyir
Nonsense, I trained a deep neural network on MNIST.

------
ucaetano
Given this story [1], it will be interesting to see how the differences in
culture and openness will allow to perform well inside the company, especially
if it requires deprioritizing a walled-garden ecosystem to succeed in AI.

1: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-
no...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-now-
struggles-to-be-heard-above-the-crowd-1496849095)

------
DmitryOlshansky
All the AI movements... Yet they still can’t get basic full text search right
in Apple Music.

------
jumelles
About time! Apple's got a whole lot of catching up to do if they want Siri to
be in competition with Google Asst and Alexa

~~~
abritinthebay
It could be more feature rich but I'll take Siri's massive lead in privacy
over either of the other two tbh.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Siri has a massive lead for you and the 5 people who use PGP for their day-to-
day email correspondences. That's not enough to build a business on.

~~~
namelost
Most people just don't care about the voice assistant on their phones, despite
the efforts of Google, Apple and Samsung to make them care. Using a voice
assistant in a public place still marks you out as some kind of weirdo. Siri
is great for setting timers, that's all that matters really.

~~~
abritinthebay
Things I regularly use Siri for:

\- timers

\- sending text messages hands free

\- controlling homekit stuff

\- playing music requests (usually in the car)

I'm honestly not sure what else I'd use a voice assistant for and Siri works
_great_ for all of those tasks. Usually when I have an issue it's due to
background noise, so hardly Siri's fault.

Quite frankly the "siri is crap" meme seems to be just that: a meme, with very
little basis in reality. She's not quite as feature rich as the others but...
who cares?

------
changoplatanero
I heard rumors from Apple people that Carlos Guestrin in Seattle and Russ
Salakhutdinov in Pittsburgh were both trying to be Apple's head ML/AI person.
I wonder how Giannandrea's hiring will effect this.

~~~
ttul
Those other guys are definitely not getting the job.

------
fuddle
I'm surprised he was able to move straight to Apple. Would Google not have a
strict non-compete clause?

~~~
philip1209
Non-compete agreements are banned in California:

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-
californi...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californias-
ban-on-non-compete-agreements_us_58af1626e4b0e5fdf6196f04)

~~~
debt
Man, he just walked right into that one, huh?

------
s3r3nity
This is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years, given that
Android had a huge setback in the Oracle v Google case [1]. The huge sell of
Android over iOS, besides the customization features, was the Google AI
superiority over Siri.

My hypothesis is that this move, if executed well, should help narrow the AI
perception gap. I think customers know that Google will probably always be
superior in AI, but if the gap on mobile is marginal, and combined with the
added security that Apple is famous for building into their phones during a
time when the Facebook scandal and other data breaches are causing users to be
more sensitive to their data, could result in a very interesting market share
shift over the next few years.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned-
platf...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned-platform/)

~~~
sorenjan
My hypothesis is that most customers doesn't care about AI and that it wont
affect phone sales numbers at all.

~~~
s3r3nity
I'd agree with you, but almost every Youtube video I watch comparing iPhones
vs. Pixels, or HomePod vs. Google Home, always tend to get to focusing on what
Google queries can accomplish vs. Siri queries. It might not be called "AI"
concretely, but the sentiment is probably there to some extent for some users.

~~~
sorenjan
Some users, sure. Maybe 10% of all people that look at Youtube videos about
new phones will care enough to make it part of their decision. But they're a
small minority of everyone that buys phones.

Homepod vs Google Home is a bit different though, since that's their only
reason to exist.

~~~
Houshalter
AI kind of sucks now though. As it gets better and more people use it, it will
be more of a selling feature. That's what they are betting on anyway.

------
jonhendry18
Is Giannandrea an "AI guy"? His background, albeit impressive, suggests he's
more of a search guy who got AI added to his plate of responsibilities. Maybe
that matters, maybe it doesn't.

Anyone know? I'm just wondering if Apple hired a fine executive, just maybe
not the best person to run AI.

------
hyperpallium
Apple has a 600 GFLOPS NPU in the iPhone X. Nvidia's $3000 Titan V has a 110
TFLOPS TPU. After a couple of decades of researchers using GPU's for compute,
dedicated hardware is available, with a better FLOPS/$ ratio. Looks like the
future of compute.

We'll see Apple releasing more uses of their NPU for AI.

~~~
ipsum2
Flops is a useless metric in general, there are benchmarks for machine
learning that make valid comparisons between CPU/GPU/NPU/etc.

~~~
hyperpallium
I wasn't confining it to machine learning, but compute in general. (I'm
interested in simulation.) Are machine learning benchmarks applicable to non-
machine learning computation?

------
orionblastar
What happened to their no poaching agreements?

~~~
sangnoir
The biggest proponent/driver of the agreement died a few years back
(pancreatic cancer).

~~~
TheForumTroll
That was only one sided though.

~~~
sangnoir
> That was only one sided though.

Extensively quoting The Verge[1] on the subject:

 _And yet, Intel actually had a written document describing a non-poach
agreement with Pixar, where Intel 's policy was to not hire any Pixar employee
without the Pixar CEO's express approval.

"If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel,
contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the
candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will
contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire," read the Intel document.

...

"Mr. Jobs wrote: "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would
stop doing this." Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs's email to undisclosed
recipients, writing: "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple
and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know
why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so
please let me know as soon as you can."

Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee "who contacted this Apple
employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour." Mr. Geshuri
further wrote: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This
was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does
not happen again."

Three days later, Shona Brown, Google's Senior Vice President for Business
Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri, writing: "Appropriate response, thank you.
Please make a public example of this termination with the group."_

1\. [https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-
scandal-...](https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-
unredacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini)

~~~
jarsin
Still waiting on the public example of sending these execs to prison.

------
telltruth
This guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000
ft. He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know
even his name. I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field let
alone what kind of actual technical details he knows. As far as I have known
these sort of people, they wear suits, memorize buzz words that their reports
talk about and take credit of work done by their reports. Such “AI exec” hire
is no-op in my book and it isn’t a surprise that Apple has to run PR articles
to justify their purchase of a suit.

~~~
DeusExMachina
Some people on HN seem to constantly despise any manager in a company that is
not a technical person. Whether it's a majority or not is hard to tell, but
it's a conspicuous group of people for sure looking at upvoted comments of the
sort.

The theory seems to be that all these companies work only because of their
engineers. Management is just useless. They are just "people with suits, that
memorize buzz words take credit for the work of others".

With all such incompetent people in high position, one has to wonder how these
companies seem to survive for so long.

Maybe, just maybe, they are not so incompetent and raise to those positions
because of merits. Maybe engineering skils are not the only needed ones.

It seems to me that this culture is just based on resentment for the people
that are higher in a hierarchy. From this point of view, the only way to feel
good is to disparage them and assume they are there only because of the
"corruption of the system".

~~~
telltruth
No, my friend. I have lived under and interacted with enough suits at big 5
that I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see
absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this?
Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the
time. There have been suits who never actually tried out the product they
supposedly owned and preached to outside world. I am not kidding you. They
literally had no account in the system. Most suits had no clue where source
code existed for their product and even never had read documentation that
their customers had to suffer through.

Their known contribution included setting up exec retreats were people are
supposed to tell them about what needs to be done and then they go away with
“blessing” the plan that got surfaced after their reports fought it out.
Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at
customers/partners. Another was to do budgets and when things go red (or
pressured to show profits), do hard decisions, aka, throwing 10% of team under
the bus in form of layoffs. Their next contribution was to present works of
their teams when it got done and credit it to their leadership and vision. I
am talking about CVP+ levels, BTW.

It’s easy to identify these suits. Go to the leaf level employees in their
group and ask them about actual contributions of their CVPs in their product
that made a difference. If they cannot mention anything concrete other than
blanket buzz words like “leadership”, “vision” etc (in case they cannot
honestly answer) then you know you have a suit at the top.

These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who
are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any
individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that
made significant difference.

~~~
DeusExMachina
You are clearly an example of what I was talking about.

You judge the utility (or lack thereof) of these positions while never having
had one yourself. Luckily, it's the top management of a company that choses
who these are and not engineers.

It's clear from claims like "if 80% of those people disappeared you would see
absolutely no change" that you have no idea what their role is.

When you say "most suits had no clue where source code existed" you just fail
to realize that that's _good_. It's not their job to know this, it's an
engineer's job.

You talk about their "known contribution" as if it's a general sentiment, but
show no proof of it being other than your personal opinion.

In fact, it's clear from statements like " Another of their contribution was
to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners" that you have no idea
about how valuable talking to customers is for a company.

And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of
team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's
exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a
company needs.

~~~
nickpinkston
DeusExMachina speaks the truth.

Bad leaders can ruin great teams and great leaders can turn around weak teams.
I've seen/done it myself. Without fail, when I switch out a weak manager for a
better one, the team improves. When groups have no manager they might produce,
but usually not well or as well as they could.

Management isn't around because some conspiracy made by managers to perpetuate
themselves, but because it works. No effective group of people is truly
leaderless.

~~~
telltruth
Pure managers (ie non technical managers) tend to hire other pure managers.
They tend to over-amplify role of management vs technical problem solving.
They often believe later is just “commodity” while projecting management
skills as rare mysterious abilities. It is not an accident that pure managers
at CVP+ levels are able to command more compensation than entire team of 20
people. This phenomenon is purely because pure managers keep projecting
management as some sacred priesthood. In all teams I have worked I have known
people who can easily do CVP job at quarter of the cost and twice the
efficiency and technical chops. Despite this you see these inefficient people
taking away massive funds. Why do you think there is no conspiracy?

~~~
nickpinkston
That's bad managers hiring other bad managers. It's not a conspiracy; it's
incompetence.

The problem likely goes all the way to the board of directors who should hold
the CEO accountable to build a culture that doesn't let bad managers exist in
the org (by coaching or removing them).

A lot of companies have this problem, and it's a major dysfunction, but make
no mistake, it's :bad: managers you have a problem with, not "pure" ones. I
know a ton of great non-tech leaders who do amazing work of leading technical
teams because they build the team around that. You get the lead engineer(s) to
run the tech leadership while empowering them with autonomy / resources /
support and holding them constantly accountable to well defined goals.

Management isn't rocket science, it's just a lot of hard work and discipline.
It is its own craft and a very challenging and rewarding one if it suits you.

------
lavabender
.

~~~
thedirt0115
Can you elaborate?

~~~
wufufufu
edit: original comment was "Inconsiderate timing?"

There's an ongoing emergency at the YouTube campus

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter-
re...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter-reported-
youtube-hq/)

------
ForrestN
I'm curious how this will impact Siri's development. My understanding is that
Siri has been (maybe still is?) somewhat ahead in terms of understanding
language flexibly and naturally, so if Giannandrea can help them catch up on
the things that Google is good at, could they leap ahead?

~~~
twoodfin
My uninformed impression is that Google Assistant is exceptionally good at the
things Google-the-search-engine is exceptionally good at: Type/say an
awkwardly worded query and get a highlighted (and usually correct) answer.

It's not clear to me how Siri gets as good at that kind of thing without the
Google search index (and all the results quality work that has been Google's
bread and butter for over a decade).

------
cobbzilla
Was I the only one who read the headline as "Apple Hires Google's AI Chef"?

The Google cafeteria has gotten seriously high-tech: now they have an AI-
powered chef cooking meals. It knows what you want to eat before you do! The
AI Chef is so popular that Google is now selling AI Chef services to other
corporate cafeterias.

