
Machine Learning Research at Apple - tosh
https://machinelearning.apple.com
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FlyingLawnmower
Hats off to people like Carlos Guestrin & John Giannandrea, who seem to have
pushed a cultural shift through Apple. I didn't think I'd see a site like this
a few years ago, based on Apple's historic reputation of strongly discouraging
employees from publishing research.

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redredrobot
Not to take away from the people who worked hard to shift the culture (which
is always hard at a large company), but I saw the same shift happen at Amazon
and it came down to a simple fact - it's very hard to recruit and keep the
best talent if you don't publish. You don't build ML reputation and the best
researchers often don't want to work somewhere where they can't add papers to
their resume.

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DrNuke
Not sure about this: a lot of interesting work is just hidden because of NDAs,
commercial IP, military, etc. You will never see anything made public until
necessary and just the minimum amount required.

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m0zg
I don't think that's actually true. Lots of stuff gets published that could
(and if the bean counters had their say _would_) be "hidden". But NONE of it
is published by commercial labs before all the patents are filed. MS Research
cranks out an amazing number of patents. As does Google Brain and Deepmind.
Then they have this Mexican standoff and "license" patents to each other.

But _some_ select stuff does not get published. I know of at least two
examples first hand: one at MS, one at Google. This is usually the case when
publishing a paper would help large, direct competitors to partially or fully
close staggering competitive gaps. As you can imagine Google doesn't publish a
whole lot on the subject of search ranking, for example.

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bubblethink
Isn't it just defensive ? Is there any instance of anyone using or licensing
an ML patent ? Mostly people like IBM, MS, etc. were doing patents anyway for
decades, and they continue to do so. So everyone else has to play the same
game. I don't think there has been any big case involving patent infringement
over ML/AI.

~~~
m0zg
It's "defensive" only until the company starts sliding financially, at which
point it becomes _very_ offensive. That's how IBM got MS into this game: one
day IBM lawyers showed up with an invoice at Bill Gates' office.

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moralestapia
The open stance on R&D that the industry is currently adopting is good for
everybody involved. I hope it will become the norm someday.

Journals and other centralized entities that regulate access to science should
wane and disappear, the sooner the better.

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Angostura
> Journals and other centralized entities that regulate access to science
> should wane and disappear, the sooner the better.

To the extent that other mechanisms are in place to to peer review research
and curate quality, yes. And yes I'm aware that the current system is far from
perfect.

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person_of_color
Ian Goodfellow is at Apple but doesn’t appear in any of these papers.
Interesting.

Is he on something too secret to reveal? Leading the SDC effort? The Karpathy
of Apple?

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cyrksoft
I think he joined last year, not sure when. Maybe that has something to do
with this.

EDIT: He joined in March 2019 as Director of the Special Projects Group.

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hunvreus
Built with Next.js:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/rauchg/status/1286769353027801088](https://mobile.twitter.com/rauchg/status/1286769353027801088)

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option
I remember ICML 2015 in Beijing when I was the only one (I suspect there was
another guy but apparently he even had to hide his affiliation) from Apple at
the conference. Not allowed to officially/publicly to talk about what I do.
Went only because of networking and to hire people. Times change slowly there.

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lern_too_spel
Discussed 3 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804018)

~~~
saagarjha
Different content. Back then it was a handful of cherry-picked publications
expanded into articles, now it seems like the page is an overt advertisement
of Apple’s Machine Learning efforts.

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lavoiems
Interesting. I thought that apple mostly did closed research, yet they are
publishing in public conference.

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nojvek
I mean Apple would have to be open eventually right? To attract and retain
talent, if everyone else is doing it?

It's like Microsoft under Satya Nadella, really understood that Open Source is
a way to actually win developers, rather than Steve Ballmers "Developers!
Developers!" chant that was just marketing speak.

So if you want to be in the same league as Deep Mind, MSR, FAIR, Google
Research, then you gotta play like them.

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Lastweek
guys, is this the first time apple is involved with academic papers?

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aratno
Nope, they've been sharing their research more widely in the last few years.
Here's an example from 2018, in a different area of research:
[https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p540-shraer.pdf](https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p540-shraer.pdf)

