The organizational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies.
Anybody know more details? As non-corporate entity the opportunity is very interesting due to the potential of having access to their infrastructure. The cost of running AI projects on the cloud is currently prohibitive and am forced to run on performance limited machines.
Are LeCun, Corrado, etc. actually running this? They're pretty busy, and the website doesn't sound like them:
"We believe that by taking a multi-party stakeholder approach to identifying and addressing challenges and opportunities in an open and inclusive manner, we can have the greatest benefit and positive impact for the users of AI technologies. While the Partnership on AI was founded by five major IT companies, the organization will be overseen and directed by a diverse board that balances members from the founding companies with leaders in academia, policy, law, and representatives from the non-profit sector. By bringing together these different groups, we will also seek to bring open dialogue internationally, bringing parties from around the world to discuss these topics."
This sounds like it was written by some PR person. Google and Facebook are "IT companies"?
You could define an IT company to be a company whose primary business is computer-based storage, retrieval, and manipulation of information, and with such a definition what company could be more IT-like than Google or Facebook?
"Finally we announced the Partnership on AI to benefit people and society!
Amazon, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft will collaborate to advance understanding of AI and discuss best practices on challenging issues such as ethics and trust. The five companies are founding the initiative, but everybody is invited to join.
Representatives are Eric Horvitz (Microsoft), Yann LeCun (Facebook), Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind), Ralf Herbrich (Amazon), and myself from IBM.
More info at www.partnershiponai.org
Looking forward to start working together on this exciting initiative!"
"A picture of the co-founders of the Partnership on AI, at the IBM Watson Headquarters in NYC (on Astor Place, across the street from my Facebook office!).
With Eric Horvitz, Francesca Rossi, me and Mustafa Suleyman.
Ralf Herbrich joined us by phone from Germany."
At the risk of ad hominem, this is typical techcrunch reporting:
>> "Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of whom are part of this new group."
How exactly is it that TC knows that Apple has indeed fallen behind? Are they privy to the Apple ML roadmap? Are they using lack of open source activity as a metric to make this claim? Is there an unidentified source who can objectively measure the ML progress across these organizations, and using this objective metric, conclude that Apple is behind?
It's a claim without much substance, and paints Apple in a negative light. You could say that this is a marketing failure on the part of Apple, and you might be correct. For example, see the article floating a few weeks ago on Medium (I think) on how Apple was embedding ML in everything.
In the days of price performance wars in CPUs (and GPUs), there were more or less objective (err, almost objective) benchmarks that people could point to. This is not the case with ML/DL. It would be great if we could say: "Across image classification, the precision / recall is X, vs. Facebook's Y. Clearly, Apple has more work todo in image classification. But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead, with metrics A vs. B from Facebook..
What is happening with ML/DL/AI/whatever is that all companies are using the same bag of words to describe what they do, but the popular press is not discerning enough to make heads or tales out of what they report on, and they end up mis-educating the public.
>> "Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of whom are part of this new group."
could easily be replaced by "Apple decided not to join the group because they're so advanced compared to its rivals. This group was actually created in an attempt to catch-up with Apple".
Both of these extreme claims aren't really back up by substantial facts.
Well are we talking about applied AI or theoretical AI? As a dumb user (and I use Apple products), I definitely get the feeling that Apple is behind in the game. Now do they have kick-ass R&D that isn't getting shipped to users? Perhaps, but that's not what customers and investors care about.
Honestly this comment reads like an emotional outburst, by someone who has zero clue about the domain.
Its very well known fact in AI/ML community, that Apple has almost little or no talent nor do they have any major efforts at organizational level (E.g. FAIR at FB, MSR, Brain & Deep Mind at Google).
>> But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead.
LOL where did you get this from? I am pretty sure that Google NTM which was put in production yesterday is the state of the art.
Also there are metrics e.g. in the report released yesterday you can find BLEU scores on WMT 2014 tasks, and the clear conclusion is that Google is way ahead. Also when it comes to Imagenet or Coco challenges, I don't think Apple has competed in any let alone placing anywhere at top, while FB, MSR and Google all have had top models.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144v1.pdf
>> but the popular press is not discerning enough to make heads or tales out of what they report on, and they end up mis-educating the public.
Sorry you are wrong, the sad reality (for Apple), is that they are truly 3-4 years behind FB, MSFT & Google.
"But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead." was an example of a statement that could be made if metrics existed, he is not asserting that that is true.
I assumed that he was asserting it to be true, because as my updated comments shows, the metrics do exist. But Apple neither releases them nor does it discloses the architecture/technology (if any) used.
As others have mentioned, you are completely wrong in your assumptions. It is you who shows zero clue in reading comprehension and communication. I'm well aware of the benchmarks used by industry and academia. I've been working in the industry for many years, including multiple ML-based products used commercially and running in production serving a large number of customers. Machine translation was just an example, and there was no assertion that company A is better than B; I was in no way "asserting it to be true". I was merely providing an illustrative example to highlight the fact that * popular press * articles about ml, such as this one, are quick with subjective opinion, without providing in writing the necessary citation and metrics to back their claims. Furthermore, they do so at a generalized level, without going into specific subdomains. My initial post was intended as a constructive comment, so take it as such.
Following that line of reasoning lets just assume that Apple has solved Quantum Computers, Teleportation and Room temperature superconductors why stop at AI/ML
Uh, you're just making this up. You have no idea whether the "microphone" (by the way, for those who are not fact-averse, it's dual beam-forming mics) in the new wireless earbuds is "laughable".
They aren't even released yet. You've never tried them. You have no idea whatsoever.
By the way, it's actually very easy to teach Apple's devices the word "fucking". You haven't figured it out yet, but that doesn't make it Apple's fault. Did you try Googling it yet or spending five seconds figuring it out yet? I can assure you, I'm quite able to use any profanity I want on Apple's devices; they learned about my inclination towards profanity years ago and have flawlessly handled it since.
>They aren't even released yet. You've never tried them. You have no idea whatsoever.
This is a funny assertion.
I've used a microphone before, I've used headphones before, and I've used Siri before.
Call me brazen but I believe I can imagine the advanced world that will exist post Apple wireless earbuds, dual beaming microphones and all.
You seem really impassioned about for a product that you also haven't used and the media has generally laughed at and dismissed.
You also didn't actually respond to my main point about them, that Siri never delivered on its value proposition. If it had, it might be considered a great product.
> You seem really impassioned about for a product that you also haven't used and the media has generally laughed at and dismissed.
I didn't read it as being for a product, but instead, against people being against it without having tried it. Granted, it's certainly possible to be against something without having tried it (for instance, I've never broken a bone in my body, but I'm pretty confident in my stance against ever wanting to do it), but when it comes to something like how well a new microphone works, it's really hard to say without having tried it and without having anybody else who's tried to it rely on. Relying on the media you've read that "laughed at and dismissed" it isn't relying on much at all, until it's actually released and properly reviewed.
He is referring to the fact that a mic with poor speech to text models isn't that helpful. Which is not made up, Apple is definitely behind Google (and perhaps others) in the accuracy of their mobile speech to text.
> Apple can't figure out that I don't want to say 'ducking' after hundreds of times of dismissing it with their keyboard.
Or they can predict, but don't because it's a swear word and it's a product decision.
Apple's historical secrecy does hurt them here. However, they have taken the stance to not slurp everything up and pack it off to the mothership like Google, which I understand has led to some interesting work on resource constrained models (since it has to run on your device) and data anonymization.
All you have to do is type "fucking" ONCE, then tap the word "fucking" in quotes, on the left-hand side of the suggestions/corrections bar, and the word is learned as an acceptable dictionary word. Permanently. Forever. And that persists when you change devices.
Anyone feigning ignorance of this feature at this point just isn't trying very hard.
> there were more or less objective (err, almost objective) benchmarks [...] This is not the case with ML/DL.
You are completely wrong about this. Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have all participated in public, objective ML competitions such as ILSVRC. They also all publish academic papers with results on standard ML benchmarks, and often running code as well. They even publish their own benchmark datasets such as the widely used MS-COCO or today's YouTube-8M. Apple does none of this, and that's where the perception that they are behind comes from.
To clarify, this was not in reference to the lack of metrics in the field, which exist, obviously. Nor was it in reference to the lack of metrics / citations in academic and scientific publications. This was in reference to a lack of specific citations/metric backing up a claim, from a popular publication targeting a mass audience does not necessarily have the subject matter expertise to fill in the data on their own. The information you provide comparing Apple's lack of benchmarking to others would have been useful to have in the article.
Okay, which AI are they talking about? The term can mean various things. I mean if this were merely heuristic neural networks, one would think that Tesla would be included.
Job one for the AI: given the set of other companies involved in AI research, determine which one, if invited to join as a sixth partner, produces a new acronym that is less silly than "im fag"
Calling simple statistical clustering algorithms that are tweaked by lots of trial-and-error heuristics "AI" feels like calling those slow two-wheeled electric self-balancing skateboards "hoverboards". Sometimes marketing can be too dramatic.
> Deep learning is not a simple statistical clustering algorithm.
What is it, then?
In the 60s people used backpropagation to train neural networks. NN + BP is a very simple statistical clustering algorithm. I know that when I worked on neural networks in the 90s we still used backpropagation. Are they using something different now?
No, I don't think so. AFAIK, deep learning is essentially the same 1960s algorithms[1] (possibly modified a bit) running on much larger networks. Most progress is due to better hardware (and ad hoc configurations, made possible by the larger networks afforded by better harder). Of course, SAT solvers, which have become extremely effective in recent years, are also still based on a 1960s algorithm[2], so use of an old algorithm doesn't imply lack of progress in effectiveness.
The two (NN and SAT solvers) share little theoretical progress (and certainly no theoretical breakthrough) in the past several decades, but SAT solvers aren't marketed as "AI" in spite of their seemingly magical abilities. I know that ML researchers usually cringe at the name AI and often try to disassociate themselves from the sci-fi term, but still, the marketing is extremely aggressive and misleading.
I realize that in every generation, marketers like associating the name "AI" with some particular class of algorithms, but it's important to understand that currently, assigning that name to this class of statistical clustering algorithms (regardless of their remarkable effectiveness in some tasks) is a stretch, just as it was when the term was assigned to other algorithms.
I don't deny that it works, but it isn't AI (not that statistical clustering isn't possibly a foundation for AI -- we have no idea -- but the current state-of-the-art is a far cry from the sci-fi meaning of the term).
AGI is a recent term coined precisely because the name AI has become confusing, which is precisely my point. It is also not widely known and used for the large part by people who believe in a sci-fi rapture-like event called the "technological singularity[1]", and so carries a bit of a cultish connotation. It doesn't do much to allay the confusion, though, as the term AI (even if understood to refer to something weaker than AGI) can be confused to be a component of AGI. I imagine that at some point, something called AI may eventually lead to AGI, but we have absolutely no idea whether what we call AI now is even on the right path, so the confusion remains.
It is true that some algorithm has been called AI for decades. It wasn't always this one or anything similar to it. Both Lisp and Prolog were thought to be AI languages at one point.
My point is that the word "AI" has been referring to "weak AI" for decades. Everything from video game AI, expert systems in the 80's, genetic algorithms, searching algorithms, etc, have been called AI. There is no point arguing about the word "AI" now.
The word AGI is pretty established. There are AGI conferences. I've heard it used by a wide variety of people, not just singularitarians. "Strong AI" is another common term.
I don't think there is much doubt at this point that neural networks are on the right path for AI. They are extremely general, have made remarkable progress in widely different AI domains, and are the closest AI approach to the human brain.
> I don't think there is much doubt at this point that neural networks are on the right path for AI.
Not only is there doubt, I don't think any NN researcher would even dare to suggest (based on scientific knowledge; not as a mere conjecture) that neural networks, and certainly current NN algorithms, have anything to do with AGI, which, at this point, is still a dream or a sci-fi concept.
> They are extremely general, have made remarkable progress in widely different AI domains
They work precisely where statistical clustering works, because that's what they are. Statistical clustering is extremely effective.
> and are the closest AI approach to the human brain.
We don't know that. It is possible, even likely, that statistical learning plays some low-level role in the brain. We know little beyond that, but it is pretty certain that neurons in the brain work very differently from neural networks. I don't think anyone imagines that backpropagation is used by the brain.
Actually that sounds like some shade tossed on this endevour. i.e. They were either not asked, or had to pony up money that only a multibillion dollar megacorp could part with.
> They were either not asked, or had to pony up money that only a multibillion dollar megacorp could part with.
Perhaps you're right, but at least it seems like OpenAI would like to join if/when invited. Judging from the press release it sounds like this partnership intend to invite non-corporate/non-profit members soon (and I think they'll loose a lot of credibility and support if they don't):
"Academics, non-profits, and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the Board of the organization, named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI)." ... "There will be equal representation of corporate and non-corporate members on the board of this new organization"
Oh, great. So all the companies that have recently had the most problems with ethics issues and user privacy issues are now collaborating in order to more effectively address those issues? Pardon me if my scoffing is audible.
IMHO ethics will effectively be the defining characteristic of AI in the future. The companies who innovate AI, however, will probably never mention it except as marketing copy.
That leaves literally everyone else holding the bag in regards to judging the industries actions and holding it accountable for transgressions. I'm not sure how that will work out, but I'm not terribly hopeful...
I'm probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I would actually be more at ease in general if most people would defer critical judgments to a reliable and open-sourced AI. For example in terms of driving, my discomfort about how an AI would handle being Kobayashi Maru'd is far less significant than my discomfort about encountering a teenage driver.
A major book about ethics, "After Virtue", takes as half of is subject matter what the author calls "the interminable nature of ethical debates" and the failure of post-enlightenment ethical thinking.
I don't see how AI is going to suddenly make us capable of ethical reasoning on a large scale... unless... maybe AI could do the reasoning for us...
It may be a focus for people who are not actively working on the machines, but for people who are actively innovating in the AI space, the most powerful machines will be created by the people who are spending the least amount of time stressing over the ethics of various decisions. More powerful AI means a more competitive business, so the industry will self-select for those with lesser concerns for the ethical implications of AI.
We already know that we are unable to hold industry accountable for unethical action. How many times did we scream about Facebook's increasing privacy abuses? How many times do people talk about being uneasy because Google knows where their flights are, where their home is, where their favorite restaurants are, even if it was not told explicitly. And, despite all the complaints, the industry giants committing the worst atrocities remain the biggest giants. It's because violating the rights of your users makes you competitive, and the users can't tear themselves away from the increased power that it lends the features.
We need to accept that when AI arrives, we're not going to have very many controls over what it does. Regardless of how terrible the implications might be, we're going to be about as effective at stopping the arrival of AI as we have been at stopping the arrival of global warming. We need to prepare for a post-AI future and just accept that it's going to be invasive and have relatively little regard for human ethical concerns, and instead be focused almost entirely on the things that make it competitive.
Lockheed Martin, their revenue stream isn't based on mining your personal information and communications. With Google at the helm there is almost no chance this stuff won't be always executing on their servers rather than in your device alone.
Analyzing data given to them or public is not the same thing as exfiltrating data from your users devices in misleading ways (e.g. Sending wifi info back even when wifi is off).
The weapons industry is one of the dirtiest and most corrupt around. I'm having a hard time understanding how concerns about which server your AI is running on trump an industry that distorts politics, misappropriates public money, and contributes to the corruption of various regimes.
So our choices are to build a peeping tom or a terminator? Whatever we build is likely to be both. (Any open-ended goal necessarily has subgoals of 'acquire information' and 'defend self by force if necessary'.)
It's only fear mongering if it's deliberate for some ulterior end. If spreading concern is only motivated by protecting the human race from destroying itself--that would be a reasonable thing to talk about. Who's benefiting from urging caution about potential bad outcomes for AGI?
Except automation unlike all those others you reference in that they all created new industries. AGI to cut the jobs and save labor costs for these large corporations.
AGI and heating oil? There's a troubling gap in reasoning there. Narrow AI and automation replacing jobs has its own set of problems. But a machine intelligence explosion is a completely different thing, and a legitimate existential risk. It's really important to understand the difference and the specific arguments.
Still, you can't find anytime in history where we ended up saying "thanks we were careful" related to new technoloies. It's usually the reverse, governments delaying change for not smart reasons.
Sure you can. When people working on the Manhattan project calculated how far away they could stand from an atomic bomb detonation--that was an appreciable precaution.
There are AGI risks that are well-reasoned and have detailed descriptions. If you aren't engaging with those arguments, proving them invalid or providing a well-reasoned protection, you aren't representing a coherent point of view.
>If you aren't engaging with those arguments, proving them invalid or providing a well-reasoned protection, you aren't representing a coherent point of view.
Since when does refusing to engage with fear mongering make you incoherent?
I already described the difference between fear mongering and pushing for caution, so don't conflate those terms. It's incoherent to not engage the arguments--take the control problem into consideration. Are you familiar with the reasoning for the expectancy that an AGI will be built that is smarter than humans at any reasoning task? Are you willing to go along with that? If so, then what follows is that the AGI improves the design of its own software and hardware better than any human engineer. At this point, there is a recursive improvement process termed an "intelligence explosion". From that point forward, we have no idea how to ensure that the goals of the AGI remain in alignment with human values. And the AGI can out-maneuver any attempt to turn it off. It's not guaranteed that it will want to avoid being turned off; but you could easily see how avoiding being turned off would improve the probability that it achieves its optimization parameters.
Where do you check out?
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the thought leader on this subject and he spells it out in this talk: https://goo.gl/DzNnk2. His book, Superintelligence, is really good.
Edit 2: And here is the audio for a Sam Harris talk also on this subject: https://goo.gl/6wdG43
Anthropic principle. You are not observing the counterfactual universes where people weren't careful enough around certain dangerous technologies, because in those universes all the observers are dead.
It's not fear mongering. Some of the ideas I hear from people on this forum, from academia, and the likes are just downright terrifying, and we don't even know what future AI will be capable of.
We have to decide as a society, and decide really soon how far we are willing to take AI research.
We built the nuclear bomb, but we decided when to stop. We didn't build more advanced bombs that could level entire providences, even though we very well could have. I know this sounds ridiculous, in that we aren't talking the same level of potential devastation, but it's the principle I am after.
The end of the Cold War took a lot of the urgency out of nuclear weapons research, and with the urgency went the funding. That's why the US nuclear arsenal consists of designs from the 1960s and 70s, with little or no manufacture more recent than the 80s, and a litany of canceled programs from the 90s on.
Quite aside from that, there's a point past which chasing higher yields results in a loss of strategic flexibility, which is why both we and the Soviets eventually gave that up. (You can attack one big target with multiple warheads, but you can't attack multiple targets with one big warhead.) Modern nuclear weapons research and engineering, whatever there may be of it, would concentrate on boring stuff like improving efficiency and reliability, and reducing mass.
Yes, and that's why atomic weaponry is unusable and largely irrelevant. In contrast, AI is eminently usable in business and government, and in such a wide range of means and purposes that it is much more likely to change our lives, in ways that are largely still unimaginable. As more AI is adopted and shapes policy and practice throughout the world, business, gov't, and Joe Public will gradually relinquish ever more personal information to it, inviting excess oversight, micromanagement, and abuse by those who control the AI.
After all, the corporations joined in this partnership are the very behemoths that gather and control almost all the world's social and personal information, which is their primary product and essential to their revenue stream and their very survival. If the public (and gov't policy makers) ever conclude that these firms and their AI are a rising threat, then like various European countries, the US too might enact 'onerous' regulation which could diminish their access to our data, AKA their life's blood.
I think THAT'S what this AI partnership is really about. It's the start of a political action initiative, apparently led by unthreatening figures like CS academics rather than capitalists. It's intended to diffuse the visibility of these companies' advancing political interests and lobbying in Washington so their growing injection of AI into our lives won't suddenly show up on our radar one day soon as an inbound threat from the clear blue sky above. Once they gain a sufficient foothold in Washington and assure that we remain inured to the idea of AI, they can turn up the heat until we froggies boil, blissfully oblivious to the rising clouds of steam.
Whether people agree with the philosophical or political aspects of your assessment aside, this was one of the more thought-invoking comments I have read on this subject in this thread and threads like it in a while. Thank you for writing it.
AI is not a genie that can be kept in a bottle. Making a nuclear bomb is a huge engineering effort. You need to build huge facilities, acquire rare resources, and potentially test it somehow. It takes a lot of energy to get there.
Software on the other hand, my computer is running tens of millions of lines of code right now, and for stuff with heavy utility there's not much the government can do to get in the way. Cryptography is a great example of this. Cryptography used to be regulated, but because it's easy to pass around code + binaries + keys there was really nothing the government could do to stop people from using it. So it was deregulated, as an admission that if you banned cryptography, you get a population without it pitted against criminals who do have it.
I'm guessing that AI will end up much the same way. You do need a lot of data, certainly a lot more than you need to get strong encryption, but data is ultimately easy to move around compared to nuclear manufacturing facilities. And it's even more open when you consider how much data is available that might be useful to an AGI. If you give a human 500,000,000 hours to read + process + innovate using just Wikipedia, you are going to get something impressive. An AGI has access to any page that's reachable from a URL bar, and that data is not something that needs to be passed around with the AGI codebase.
Granted, I personally believe that AGIs are 30+ years away, and I don't think that Wikipedia is enough data for something like a competitive NLP machine using modern technology, but I think that's the direction we will be moving in. We should accept today that AI will be a part of the future, and prepare for the inevitability rather than try to run from it.
There's a lot to be afraid of even if you don't believe that AGI is achieveable. For example, Google has openly talked about manipulating search results to steer potential ISIS recruits away from ISIS. That's a power that they are using without oversight, and who's to say that they aren't doing similar things to influence the outcome of the US national election (they have a vested interest in seeing Hillary win - Hillary is much better for their bottom line than any other candidate).
The giants are unparalleled in terms of their access to data, and that's something alternatives and competitors can't compete with. It's also clear that for machine learning, having more data is the most effective way to get better results. Stronger algorithms are only going to go so far if your competitor has three or four orders of magnitude more data and computational power.
And that's the scale we are looking at with companies like Facebook and Google.
Google isn't "manipulating search results to steer people from ISI," nor have they suggested it. A bunch of advertisements were bought that would link ISIS keywords to videos of anti-ISIS propaganda. It's something anyone in or out of Google could do.
I'll add that I've owned both a Symbolics 3620 and a MacIvory. I was being a little glib, but I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of resurrection of the Lisp machine technology.
As usual Apple is missing. Pleasantly surprised to find Amazon on the list of collaborators. They usually take from open source/communities and rarely give back. This is a good change.
>>"As of today’s launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of which are part of this new group."
It seems Apple's lack of engagement in the community [1] is really starting to hurt it. Did anyone else take away from this that the other big players are not including them at the table/considering them real competition?
apple isn't hurt by this at all. they likely don't want to commit any resources beyond a spokesperson mentioning that their enthusiastic about it.
this partnership thing is a pr move that makes all involved look good. investors and shareholders alike thinkin "cool they're working on ai, that's good"
what will come of the partnership? nothing other than a place journalists can ping for questions about ai.
AI is by nature abstract. Once it's not abstract, there is typically a more useful term for it: classification, recognition, search, etc etc. What do you mean by doing AI right? Apple's track record with doing something right applies to product lines, not their technology.
Whether right or wrong, I think it's good to keep in mind that Apple has, by far the highest quarterly profit and total asset value, compared to any of these companies - it really is a giant among giants. Alphabet certainly has an excellent future outlook (reflected in the markets), but its current financial state still pales in comparison to Apple.
Taking this into account, I figure Apple thinks twice and thrice before joining industry consortiums and partnerships that they didn't initiate themselves. This would be straightforward posturing/strategizing on their part, and probably doesn't reveal too much about the current state of their R&D in Machine Learning. It's unfortunate that things are this way, but nothing unusual from a "game theory" perspective.
I also don't think of them as a straight technology company, but more of a best of breed product company focused on a great user experience. In that sense, high risk, long term investments that don't have an immediate application don't fit their profile.
When Apple reported Q3 earnings this year, Tim Cook said that the services revenue would be "the size of a Fortune 100 company by next year."[0] Revenue was ~6 billion in Q3, up 19% from a year prior. That comes out to roughly 20 billion a year.
When I saw everyone playing Pokemon Go and buying coins and what have you, I thought of Apple taking a 30% cut of every transaction...
The service revenue really is the strongest case for being a bull. Of course this is just my own personal opinion. I own the stock and I'm long on the prospects. I also love the products. Also so much cash!
Apple has its own OS, compilers, IDE, 2+ languages, various frameworks etc. This is more than what Google, more importantly used a lot by people. But yeah it just a hardware company.
Apple has its own OS, compilers, IDE, 2+ languages, various frameworks etc. This is more than what Google, more importantly used a lot by people. But yeah it just a hardware company.
Technology is broader than just software (though I'm not implying you said it is just software). Apple is a phenomenal technology company - their hardware + software integration is unmatched and they have made advances in everything from software to hardware to supply chain optimization to manufacturing technology.
Also, they are ( or at least were) a prime example of a company that can bet on high risk, longish term investments that don't have an immediate application : e.g. their investment in chips, touch technology etc. It may not be as long term as some of the Google X stuff but I don't think it is fair to call them averse to making high risk long term investments.
I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.
Don't agree? Let's imagine(!) two scenarios.
Scenario 1 - the US Government somehow figures out a way to force Apple to pay all its evaded taxes. Apple doesn't agree, and to make a point how important they are, killswitch everything. Results:
10% of the developed world can't use their phone anymore
10% of the developed world can't use their computer anymore
An even smaller subset can't access their e-mail
Scenario 2 - the US Government somehow figures out a way to force Google to pay all its evaded taxes. Google doesn't agree, and to make a point how important they are, killswitch everything. Results:
90% of the developed world can't use their phone anymore
90%+ (Android owners + Gmail, Gcal etc. users) of the developed world can't access their e-mail, calendars, contacts etc. anymore
??% (decently high) of companies/universities can't access their e-mail, calendars etc., because Google Apps is down
??% has trouble navigating because Google Maps goes down (Other maps are still inaccurate and incomplete outside of the US)
??% of companies experience issues by Google Maps+API being down (Uber springs to mind)
Advertising also stops working and paying out (can be switched easily though, so not as critical)
Besides that, Alphabet is also involved in a number of moonshot projects. (Level 4) Self-driving cars. immortality research, AI research, LTE balloons, etc. etc.
The funny part is that I'm typing this on a 13" Retina MBP, with a iPhone 5S in my pocket. I'm by no means a Google fanboy. I love Apple's vertical integration, the amount of synergy and seamlessness their devices have, and that they're championing individual privacy. Also doesn't hurt that compared to Linux, OS X is a godsend to dev on.
I've done enough inebriated rambling so I'm gonna shut up now..
Still gave KAT owner's IP address and all his .icloud e-mails to the FBI without any resistance. WTF?
>* I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.*
Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.
The exact same thing holds for Google Search. They have not generated any product that brings as much cash as search ads (not even close) -- and that's since 1998 or so.
Google Docs, Google +, Google Glass (lol) etc never went anywhere much, revenue wise, and even Android is mostly a loss as far as Google is concerned, even including licenses and mobile ads (makes a good buck for Samsung though).
> The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.
They serve the top end of the market (neither feature phones, not "just give me some smartphone free with the contract") where there are not much competitive pressures and they've been milking more profit than all Android shops combined at that. Besides, that we have been kept hearing since 2008 when Android appeared, and it hasn't even happened in the desktop/laptop space (the sell 5-10% of PCs and get 45% of the PC profits).
Google has not made anything that generates the profit, but they still can pull some levers to make their search even more difficult (remove verbatim for example) so you'd spend more time on it (thus generate more ad money).
Also they've got those cute/silly moonshots that just might pan out.
Let's assume all these assertions are correct i.e. the disappearance of every Google product would hurt more than the same scenario but sub Google -> Apple. That doesn't actually imply that Google > Apple (in terms of general influence) in the world in which they both do exist.
My interpretation of your post is that Google might be more _important_ than Apple. And my counterargument is that importance is not equivalent to influence.
> However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.
You just gave some very "flashy & visible" examples of Alphabet's influence while citing only a "big pile of cash" as Apple's flashy & visible trait.
Apple have always been the most secretive and they almost NEVER announce something before they're ready to advertise it.
Did anybody see the New Mac Pro redesign coming? What about the fact that they were developing a whole new language for 4 years before anybody suspected it, Swift? Now it's one of their biggest things ever (one of fastest growing languages on GitHub by some metrics.)
Hell, even the PowerPC to Intel jump could be considered a surprise, even though they had been working on it for 5 years. [1]
Now, just recently they revealed a bunch of stuff powered by offline machine learning in iOS 10 and the macOS Photos — all without sending your info to Apple — and frankly I'm more impressed by this and the differential privacy thing than with Google's efforts towards centralized AI.
If one were to make any guesses, I'd say Apple is in a unique position to build an AI network distributed across all their devices, without leaking privacy to Apple or anyone. This is very attractive to me as a user, even if I have "nothing to hide." There are over a billion iPhones and iPads and Macs combined, with beefier processors on average compared to the majority of Androids. Android's fragmentation may also make it harder for Google to pull off the same, even if they were to make a commitment to user privacy.
I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines. EVEN if Apple is just using it as PR ammo, Google and Facebooks are objectively the worst offenders in this area and they don't look so nice and shiny a People's Champion in a privacy-focused future. It may take just one good open-sourced and distributed search engine, or a newer and more hip social platform (Snapchat looks like a good contender there), to unravel all their prospects.
I agree with almost everything you said, except this part.
> I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines.
It seems like only a minority cares about privacy concerns to even understand them well and take some action. Even when privacy issues make the headlines, billions of people just shrug their shoulders (and perhaps a few thousand say a curse word or two) but still go back to the same old ways they've been using Facebook, Google, etc.
I feel sad that the winds aren't changing direction, or at least not fast enough to be a force to reckon with.
As they have been doing from the beginning. The masses only act contrary to top level input when desperately hungry. Even their righteous anger is scripted and handed down.
What has been the problem is that the critical non-elite core (say 10%) of society was ignorant of the consequences of these technologies and they are now getting a better sense.
We only have to educate the 10% and only need to provide secure software for these same 10%. Societies change when the 10% no longer accepts the rule of the 1%. This is the primary critique against geek efforts to get "grandma" using crypto. If grandma is part of the 10%, she'll be able to follow step by step instructions.
Yeah, I should've said "I'd like to think/hope the winds are changing" but still, things like all the new messaging apps that make end-to-end encryption a selling point, and services like Skype losing active users at a rapid rate, do point to an undeniable if yet-miniscule effect.
Even during casual conversations with some of my friends who wouldn't be expected to care about these issues, they occasionally let out a glib "Sorry NSA!" whenever they say something that's known to be picked up by their monitoring.
So there is change. There is a chilling effect. And a big player like Apple making a big deal out of it, does help.
Both Google and Apple are extremely important, valuable companies that have had a very significant impact on the world and culture.
Google created Google - they more or less are the internet (that and Facebook) for the world. To 'Google' something is a phrase that entered into the vocabulary a very long time ago. Both their enormous presence in Internet/search, plus more cultural things like Youtube makes it unable to imagine a world without them.
Apple created iPhone. Holy shit, the iPhone. More or less, they invented the smartphone and the ecosystem around it. I really do wonder whether things like Uber would exist if Apple never made iPhone. I doubt Twitter would be as popular. Entire industries have been created now because Apple made iPhone[1].
They're both world-changing companies that have had an enormous impact. This pissing competition of who's bigger and better is so unimportant and just misses the point entirely.
[1] This is actually an interesting thought exercise, for me at least. What would have actually happened if Apple didn't make the iPhone? It's been shown that before release Android pivoted from a Blackberry device (btw, Blackberry just announced they're going to stop making hardware) to a more 'iPhone-like' device once iPhone was announced.
The most favourable approach is that it would have taken Android and Microsoft longer to get to the stage that iPhone was to create the type of influence things like the App Store has.
"What would have actually happened if Apple didn't make the iPhone?"
I bet that nothing much different, another company would have made one in 1-2 years timeframe. The idea of "hand phone-computer" was very old (decades in sci-fi and real products in nineties called "PDA"). It just happened that around the time when Apple made the first iPhone, tech was advanced and cheap enough for the mass market. To sum up, it was perfect timing, not revolutionary idea.
You're forgetting the massive impact the iPhone had on the mobile web.
Before the iPhone was released, the mobile web was a mixture of rudimentary WAP/WML, or if you were lucky awful browsers that tried to render HTML. Everybody hated it.
Then the iPhone was released and it had a web browser in the same ballpark as real desktop browsers. What's more, WebKit was open-source. In next to no time, all the major phone vendors had a WebKit-based browser of their own and the mobile web took off.
Yes, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, eventually we would have gotten decent mobile web browsers. But phone vendors were doing an awful job of it up until Apple moved the whole industry forward. The only other possibility would have been Opera, but that would have required unrealistic licensing deals to have the same impact as the iPhone, and Opera ended up switching to WebKit too.
You're also forgetting about the effect the App Store had on the mobile marketplace. Before the iPhone, buying a mobile application tended to be something that nobody did. Every app had to roll their own payment infrastructure – it was painful for developers to charge and it was painful for customers to pay. Then the App Store came along and made it easy. There was little movement on centralising this beforehand from any other vendor, but as soon as Apple did it, everybody else hopped on the bandwagon.
I'm not arguing that smartphone was a huge step forward, just saying that it was only a matter of "when" and "who" not "if". Also, as for mobile web boom, I think the introduction of 3g was the key factor, there was only so much you could do with GPRS/WAP..
Sure, it would have happened eventually, but not in the 1–2 year timeframe you mentioned. Not even close, judging by the lack of progress from other vendors.
3G wasn't the deciding factor, the first iPhone didn't have it but responsive sites started popping up right away. There's also no point in 3G for web browsing unless you have a decent rendering engine – WML and XHTML Basic sites were hardly data hogs.
Yeah, that was my thought exactly. However, iPhone software was so radically different from everything else at the time that I still wonder "what" it would have been and what the App Store revolution would have looked like.
Of course, in this alternate universe it's just as likely that other amazing advancements happened because Apple didn't do iPhone.
You probably have very short memory, since when iphone 1 came out, everybody was shocked from how much better it was above anything else, and how different and better the whole experience was. Touch screen, gyroscope, sleek design compared to pen-based ridiculous slow boxy windows CE machines.
I am far from Apple fan boy and never actually owned any of their products, but boy they really brought mobile revolution to this world. It took competition many years to catch up with that, with great help of Google and their Android. Main reason why their share price skyrocketed during that time.
Blackberries predate iphone. But, you couldn't get one cheap with a phone contract. Also, it leveraged everyone's ipod song list. Not to mention the cool factor of the iphone.
> I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.
Yes, I agree essentially with the above line (though Apple & Alphabet have comparable market values, which is why I said Alphabet has an excellent outlook). I didn't intend to start a minor flame war, as I meant "giant among giants" in the financial sense only, which of course is hugely important.
In terms of influence/clout (measured in eyeballs, political heft, economic clout via product ecosystems, etc.) Alphabet likely does edge out even Apple (perhaps not "far, far beyond"). However & without going into too much detail, I think my point still stands: from a "game theory" angle, there would likely be no strategic reason for Apple to join a partnership in this case.
This is total speculation but I imagine that Google captures less of the value it creates than Apple does.
If Android makes up 90% of the market share and is half as valuable as an iPhone and Google was capturing the same % of value created Google would have revenue numbers from android that are larger than Apples from the iPhone. But it's not even comparable.
If they shut down services, they slit their own throat and cut off their revenues as well.
Apple and Google are not the only players in this game, but Microsoft as well as others.
Rather than shut stuff off, Google or Apple if forced to pay taxes will just lawyer up and appeal it in some way.
Yeah developing on OSX/MacOS is better than GNU/Linux, but if you find a good IDE with the programming language you use on GNU/Linux it gets better. Plus GNU/Linux runs on the PC Clones out there as well as ported cross platform for ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, Etc.
A reason why I use GNU/Linux is that it is free and respects my rights as a consumer with no DRM, and if I don't like one version of GNU/Linux there are hundreds of others out there. GNU/Linux is not locked to just one brand of computers as MacOS/OSX is, nor does it have DRM and Telemetry in it like Windows 10.
Why are you surprised that Apple isn't involved in a field that has no material impact on their business? Outside of Siri and related projects, I don't see where AI/machine learning has any immediate benefits.
Twitter and Intel missing seems like something to take note of, but I didn't even think twice about Apple. I'm more surprised GE is missing than Apple.
I use Android, but Apple are doing some good personal assistant stuff like tagging friends in photos, -without- uploading them to the cloud. A true personal assistant that can use machine learning locally and with discretion sounds pretty great
I'm really starting to appreciate this kind of thing about Apple. They seem to be concerned about keeping data in the hands of their users as much as possible, when the rest of the industry defaults to a cloud-hosted solution that requires the user to completely give up control.
That's a nifty feature, but I am sceptical that Apple can offer the same kind of experience when compared to cloud-based solutions that leverage massive amounts of aggregated data and backend processing.
Apple has made a pretty big deal about privacy, but they do collect user data (see the interview a few weeks ago with Apple's mapping lead -saying they are collecting user data to improve maps).
Ultimately if users want ultra smart AI assistants (Siri, Google Now, Cortana, etc.) they will need to give up some of their data.
That may be very unpopular with the HN crowd, but I suspect the vast majority of consumers will be OK with that tradeoff.
Apple also works on technology that is meant to help users give up less of their privacy. They talked about this at WWDC 2016 under the headline 'Differential Privacy'. They're trying to use statistics to make it harder to attribute data points to individuals while still providing a workable data set on the collective of users.
I use Google translate offline on Android when in China and it is great. Seems uploading the trained NN to a phone when online and then using it privately/offline is a great way to go.
At WWDC they talked about how they put AI all throughout the system. It's not just when talking to Siri. It's things like suggested apps, photo tagging, deciding when to refresh apps in the background, text prediction, and probably lots of other stuff that I can't even think of because Apple's approach to AI is to make AI largely an implementation detail of the experience rather than a user-visible component.
>> Apple's approach to AI is to make AI largely an implementation detail of the experience rather than a user-visible component.
That sums it up nicely, I'm a bit embarrassed those features didn't cross my mind when thinking about Apple/AI. Reinforces your point - its use in invisible, much like their presence in this consortium.
Because machine learning is one of the most important tricks they're going to be able to use to make their devices even more intuitively usable. There should be entire teams at Apple salivating at new ways to extend powerful functionality to users _without_ making the interface to do so gross and complicated. And they probably are -- they've acquired several ML startups lately. (Hi, Turi friends!)
I'm surprised at this "Apple not AI" narrative. I've had Google Maps & Waze on my iPhone for years and neither of them seamlessly turned on "where did I park my car" feature. I just turned my iPhone on one morning and it just told me. Now, mind you, this may not be a fancy deep learning model. It could be some simple linear model, maybe a tree model, hell, maybe it's hardcoded rules? But despite these things Apple delivered a great feature which is in the realm of what I would consider "AI enabled feature".
Mind you, I don't have an Android device, so maybe Google Maps does this automatically for you on Andriod. It doesn't do it on the iPhone, at least not automatically (aka. I don't bother to look it up, which is kind of the point).
Well, not surprised of course! Anyway, perhaps I'm just a simple man, ... besides searching the web, I think that's the best AI type feature for the consumer yet!
It uses a combination of Bluetooth (if you're near/connected to your car's stereo), motion sensor and GPS.
If you started moving at 70KM/h nowhere near a train or bus station, and then suddenly stopped moving at that speed and shortly after started moving at 5KM/h, you've clearly just got out of your car. Use bluetooth for extra verification if possible. When certain, get location (or load location) from GPS and mark spot. Tadaa, no fancy learning model needed.
Acutally not neccessarily. You can as well end up in a traffic jam. In fact that's how they display traffic info on maps: many phone users doing what you just described.
The new version of the Photos app does image recognition. It seems to work fairly well, and unlike Google Photos, happens locally on the device and doesn't require cloud uploads.
The big area for AI is to replace a human being with an AI program and not have the customer notice it.
Then those webchat and help desk jobs will be gone and replaced with AI doing robocalls and acting like a chatbot.
I'm getting Robocalls that ask for a Chris or something and as soon as I say there is nobody here by that name (so they can take me off their list) the bot cuts in saying "Maybe you can help?" and then tries to sell me something. Most of the time the Caller ID is spoofed and it calls back with a different Caller ID and number, etc. I'm on the Dot not call list, but Robocallers just war dial numbers until it reaches someone and then tries to hook them in.
Not only that but AI can take the jobs of writers, programmers, managers, legal assistants, and in robot form burger flippers and checkout kiosks.
As we reach 2020-2030 the AI is trying to get as smart as a human being. As long as it has electricity it can work 24/7 without getting tired or hungry like a human being would.
Likely this is part of why this group was created. They were probably getting tired of Apple trying to ride on everyone's hard work without giving anything back.
I see a list of companies which are ethically compromised. Apple has publicly taken the opposite side of the fence on this one. I'm not sure they want to be associated with Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft using AI to strip apart user's private behavior and reassemble it as advertising data. Would we trust a cooperative of tobacco companies funding scientific research and ethics surrounding the use and promotion of cigarettes?
Does anyone contest that Facebook's AI is going to pull apart their user's public social feeds and private FB conversations to advance their own business model?
A unification of a large group of tech companies could even be seen as an anti-OpenAI. A singleton could certainly emerge as a co-operation between multiple large corporations and/or a government. An Amazon & Google partnership is particularly terrifying considering how much computing power could be rolled over to a unified AI almost instantaneously.
We do not need an organization engaged in PR for for-profit companies attempting to placate the public while lobbying regulators while unleashing their AI on the public at large. That is what this looks like. We've seen their business ethics already. It isn't a good template moving forward.
I would be less cynical if I heard anyone else besides Apple taking a public stand on keeping personal data private and AI contained in boxes. There does need to be AI ethics and safety leaders, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon should be following not in the lead.
There's no conspiracy here. Apple is just not involved in the machine learning community in the same way as these others. Look at NIPS and you'll see activity from all of the other participants in this announcement. Apple isn't present in the same way.
> As for AI, Apple is a small and outsider player which will hurt in the long term.
Since you didn't explicitly state whom it will hurt, the devil in me reads this sentence as Apple's involvement (or lack of it) will hurt all people. :)
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Who gives a sh!t that Apple was not at the meeting. I think the main takeaway is that 4-5 companies might control one of the most powerful technologies/ideas of the last 5 years. Its already hard enough competing with these companies how is this good for everybody else?
edit: "The group plans to make discussions and minutes from meetings publicly available." I guess that is cool. But what about the competitive advantage these companies have right now? Does anybody monitor that stuff? I am not talking robots and singularity crap but rather companies that have means and the ability to make every decision with ML and the data to create an insurmountable competitive advantage.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadAnybody know more details? As non-corporate entity the opportunity is very interesting due to the potential of having access to their infrastructure. The cost of running AI projects on the cloud is currently prohibitive and am forced to run on performance limited machines.
"We believe that by taking a multi-party stakeholder approach to identifying and addressing challenges and opportunities in an open and inclusive manner, we can have the greatest benefit and positive impact for the users of AI technologies. While the Partnership on AI was founded by five major IT companies, the organization will be overseen and directed by a diverse board that balances members from the founding companies with leaders in academia, policy, law, and representatives from the non-profit sector. By bringing together these different groups, we will also seek to bring open dialogue internationally, bringing parties from around the world to discuss these topics."
This sounds like it was written by some PR person. Google and Facebook are "IT companies"?
It probably was. The article is pretty clearly a press release with some touch-up.
This happens a lot when the pressure is to be first to publish. Someone gives you a completely-written "story" and off you go.
"Finally we announced the Partnership on AI to benefit people and society!
Amazon, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft will collaborate to advance understanding of AI and discuss best practices on challenging issues such as ethics and trust. The five companies are founding the initiative, but everybody is invited to join.
Representatives are Eric Horvitz (Microsoft), Yann LeCun (Facebook), Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind), Ralf Herbrich (Amazon), and myself from IBM. More info at www.partnershiponai.org
Looking forward to start working together on this exciting initiative!"
"A picture of the co-founders of the Partnership on AI, at the IBM Watson Headquarters in NYC (on Astor Place, across the street from my Facebook office!). With Eric Horvitz, Francesca Rossi, me and Mustafa Suleyman. Ralf Herbrich joined us by phone from Germany."
>> "Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of whom are part of this new group."
How exactly is it that TC knows that Apple has indeed fallen behind? Are they privy to the Apple ML roadmap? Are they using lack of open source activity as a metric to make this claim? Is there an unidentified source who can objectively measure the ML progress across these organizations, and using this objective metric, conclude that Apple is behind?
It's a claim without much substance, and paints Apple in a negative light. You could say that this is a marketing failure on the part of Apple, and you might be correct. For example, see the article floating a few weeks ago on Medium (I think) on how Apple was embedding ML in everything.
In the days of price performance wars in CPUs (and GPUs), there were more or less objective (err, almost objective) benchmarks that people could point to. This is not the case with ML/DL. It would be great if we could say: "Across image classification, the precision / recall is X, vs. Facebook's Y. Clearly, Apple has more work todo in image classification. But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead, with metrics A vs. B from Facebook..
What is happening with ML/DL/AI/whatever is that all companies are using the same bag of words to describe what they do, but the popular press is not discerning enough to make heads or tales out of what they report on, and they end up mis-educating the public.
</soapbox> </rant>
>> "Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of whom are part of this new group."
could easily be replaced by "Apple decided not to join the group because they're so advanced compared to its rivals. This group was actually created in an attempt to catch-up with Apple".
Both of these extreme claims aren't really back up by substantial facts.
I also agree with the sentiment here on TC reporting.
Its very well known fact in AI/ML community, that Apple has almost little or no talent nor do they have any major efforts at organizational level (E.g. FAIR at FB, MSR, Brain & Deep Mind at Google).
>> But in Machine Translation, Apple is ahead.
LOL where did you get this from? I am pretty sure that Google NTM which was put in production yesterday is the state of the art.
Also there are metrics e.g. in the report released yesterday you can find BLEU scores on WMT 2014 tasks, and the clear conclusion is that Google is way ahead. Also when it comes to Imagenet or Coco challenges, I don't think Apple has competed in any let alone placing anywhere at top, while FB, MSR and Google all have had top models. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144v1.pdf
>> but the popular press is not discerning enough to make heads or tales out of what they report on, and they end up mis-educating the public.
Sorry you are wrong, the sad reality (for Apple), is that they are truly 3-4 years behind FB, MSFT & Google.
And frankly how can you be so clueless about Apple's lack of efforts in AI/ML if you claim to be member of the community.
Siri never delivered on what was promised--part of the reason the microphone in the new wireless earbuds is so laughable.
Apple currently has no answer to Allo or chat bots in general.
>For example, see the article floating a few weeks ago on Medium (I think) on how Apple was embedding ML in everything.
Plans are easy to talk about. You seem to want to give Apple a lot of credit for things going on behind closed doors.
As far as the consumer can see, they have fallen behind.
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/exclusive-apple-acquires-turi-m...
They aren't even released yet. You've never tried them. You have no idea whatsoever.
By the way, it's actually very easy to teach Apple's devices the word "fucking". You haven't figured it out yet, but that doesn't make it Apple's fault. Did you try Googling it yet or spending five seconds figuring it out yet? I can assure you, I'm quite able to use any profanity I want on Apple's devices; they learned about my inclination towards profanity years ago and have flawlessly handled it since.
This is a funny assertion.
I've used a microphone before, I've used headphones before, and I've used Siri before.
Call me brazen but I believe I can imagine the advanced world that will exist post Apple wireless earbuds, dual beaming microphones and all.
You seem really impassioned about for a product that you also haven't used and the media has generally laughed at and dismissed.
You also didn't actually respond to my main point about them, that Siri never delivered on its value proposition. If it had, it might be considered a great product.
I didn't read it as being for a product, but instead, against people being against it without having tried it. Granted, it's certainly possible to be against something without having tried it (for instance, I've never broken a bone in my body, but I'm pretty confident in my stance against ever wanting to do it), but when it comes to something like how well a new microphone works, it's really hard to say without having tried it and without having anybody else who's tried to it rely on. Relying on the media you've read that "laughed at and dismissed" it isn't relying on much at all, until it's actually released and properly reviewed.
What is a "beam-forming" microphone? Beam forming is a function of active RF elements. How is a sound-frequency receiver able to do it?
Or they can predict, but don't because it's a swear word and it's a product decision.
Apple's historical secrecy does hurt them here. However, they have taken the stance to not slurp everything up and pack it off to the mothership like Google, which I understand has led to some interesting work on resource constrained models (since it has to run on your device) and data anonymization.
Anyone feigning ignorance of this feature at this point just isn't trying very hard.
TC is not alone in saying this. It's a very common sentiment in the machine learning community. So much so that Apple recently did a big PR piece in Backchannel just to try to refute it. https://backchannel.com/an-exclusive-look-at-how-ai-and-mach...
> there were more or less objective (err, almost objective) benchmarks [...] This is not the case with ML/DL.
You are completely wrong about this. Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have all participated in public, objective ML competitions such as ILSVRC. They also all publish academic papers with results on standard ML benchmarks, and often running code as well. They even publish their own benchmark datasets such as the widely used MS-COCO or today's YouTube-8M. Apple does none of this, and that's where the perception that they are behind comes from.
Trial and error is a main way that people learn and it works.
What is it, then?
In the 60s people used backpropagation to train neural networks. NN + BP is a very simple statistical clustering algorithm. I know that when I worked on neural networks in the 90s we still used backpropagation. Are they using something different now?
Yes, why else do you think we've had such breakthroughs in the past six years?
The two (NN and SAT solvers) share little theoretical progress (and certainly no theoretical breakthrough) in the past several decades, but SAT solvers aren't marketed as "AI" in spite of their seemingly magical abilities. I know that ML researchers usually cringe at the name AI and often try to disassociate themselves from the sci-fi term, but still, the marketing is extremely aggressive and misleading.
I realize that in every generation, marketers like associating the name "AI" with some particular class of algorithms, but it's important to understand that currently, assigning that name to this class of statistical clustering algorithms (regardless of their remarkable effectiveness in some tasks) is a stretch, just as it was when the term was assigned to other algorithms.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Putnam_algorithm
I don't deny that it works, but it isn't AI (not that statistical clustering isn't possibly a foundation for AI -- we have no idea -- but the current state-of-the-art is a far cry from the sci-fi meaning of the term).
It is true that some algorithm has been called AI for decades. It wasn't always this one or anything similar to it. Both Lisp and Prolog were thought to be AI languages at one point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
The word AGI is pretty established. There are AGI conferences. I've heard it used by a wide variety of people, not just singularitarians. "Strong AI" is another common term.
I don't think there is much doubt at this point that neural networks are on the right path for AI. They are extremely general, have made remarkable progress in widely different AI domains, and are the closest AI approach to the human brain.
Not only is there doubt, I don't think any NN researcher would even dare to suggest (based on scientific knowledge; not as a mere conjecture) that neural networks, and certainly current NN algorithms, have anything to do with AGI, which, at this point, is still a dream or a sci-fi concept.
> They are extremely general, have made remarkable progress in widely different AI domains
They work precisely where statistical clustering works, because that's what they are. Statistical clustering is extremely effective.
> and are the closest AI approach to the human brain.
We don't know that. It is possible, even likely, that statistical learning plays some low-level role in the brain. We know little beyond that, but it is pretty certain that neurons in the brain work very differently from neural networks. I don't think anyone imagines that backpropagation is used by the brain.
Perhaps you're right, but at least it seems like OpenAI would like to join if/when invited. Judging from the press release it sounds like this partnership intend to invite non-corporate/non-profit members soon (and I think they'll loose a lot of credibility and support if they don't):
"Academics, non-profits, and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the Board of the organization, named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI)." ... "There will be equal representation of corporate and non-corporate members on the board of this new organization"
http://www.partnershiponai.org/2016/09/industry-leaders-esta...
That leaves literally everyone else holding the bag in regards to judging the industries actions and holding it accountable for transgressions. I'm not sure how that will work out, but I'm not terribly hopeful...
I don't see how AI is going to suddenly make us capable of ethical reasoning on a large scale... unless... maybe AI could do the reasoning for us...
We already know that we are unable to hold industry accountable for unethical action. How many times did we scream about Facebook's increasing privacy abuses? How many times do people talk about being uneasy because Google knows where their flights are, where their home is, where their favorite restaurants are, even if it was not told explicitly. And, despite all the complaints, the industry giants committing the worst atrocities remain the biggest giants. It's because violating the rights of your users makes you competitive, and the users can't tear themselves away from the increased power that it lends the features.
We need to accept that when AI arrives, we're not going to have very many controls over what it does. Regardless of how terrible the implications might be, we're going to be about as effective at stopping the arrival of AI as we have been at stopping the arrival of global warming. We need to prepare for a post-AI future and just accept that it's going to be invasive and have relatively little regard for human ethical concerns, and instead be focused almost entirely on the things that make it competitive.
Who believes that this is to favor users, believes in everything.
The character of the founders and engineers matters. Would you rather have GAI developed by DeepMind / Google, or by Lockheed Martin?
Oh, it is! Not only that, but their revenue stream is mining that data and handing it over to the government: http://www.atl.external.lmco.com/business/ATL10.php
Every single person working in a position on the cusp of automation.
The same thing happens with any new technology that threatens massive industries. (automobiles, airplanes, electricity, heating oil, etc)
There are AGI risks that are well-reasoned and have detailed descriptions. If you aren't engaging with those arguments, proving them invalid or providing a well-reasoned protection, you aren't representing a coherent point of view.
Since when does refusing to engage with fear mongering make you incoherent?
Where do you check out?
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the thought leader on this subject and he spells it out in this talk: https://goo.gl/DzNnk2. His book, Superintelligence, is really good.
Edit 2: And here is the audio for a Sam Harris talk also on this subject: https://goo.gl/6wdG43
We have to decide as a society, and decide really soon how far we are willing to take AI research.
We built the nuclear bomb, but we decided when to stop. We didn't build more advanced bombs that could level entire providences, even though we very well could have. I know this sounds ridiculous, in that we aren't talking the same level of potential devastation, but it's the principle I am after.
Quite aside from that, there's a point past which chasing higher yields results in a loss of strategic flexibility, which is why both we and the Soviets eventually gave that up. (You can attack one big target with multiple warheads, but you can't attack multiple targets with one big warhead.) Modern nuclear weapons research and engineering, whatever there may be of it, would concentrate on boring stuff like improving efficiency and reliability, and reducing mass.
After all, the corporations joined in this partnership are the very behemoths that gather and control almost all the world's social and personal information, which is their primary product and essential to their revenue stream and their very survival. If the public (and gov't policy makers) ever conclude that these firms and their AI are a rising threat, then like various European countries, the US too might enact 'onerous' regulation which could diminish their access to our data, AKA their life's blood.
I think THAT'S what this AI partnership is really about. It's the start of a political action initiative, apparently led by unthreatening figures like CS academics rather than capitalists. It's intended to diffuse the visibility of these companies' advancing political interests and lobbying in Washington so their growing injection of AI into our lives won't suddenly show up on our radar one day soon as an inbound threat from the clear blue sky above. Once they gain a sufficient foothold in Washington and assure that we remain inured to the idea of AI, they can turn up the heat until we froggies boil, blissfully oblivious to the rising clouds of steam.
Software on the other hand, my computer is running tens of millions of lines of code right now, and for stuff with heavy utility there's not much the government can do to get in the way. Cryptography is a great example of this. Cryptography used to be regulated, but because it's easy to pass around code + binaries + keys there was really nothing the government could do to stop people from using it. So it was deregulated, as an admission that if you banned cryptography, you get a population without it pitted against criminals who do have it.
I'm guessing that AI will end up much the same way. You do need a lot of data, certainly a lot more than you need to get strong encryption, but data is ultimately easy to move around compared to nuclear manufacturing facilities. And it's even more open when you consider how much data is available that might be useful to an AGI. If you give a human 500,000,000 hours to read + process + innovate using just Wikipedia, you are going to get something impressive. An AGI has access to any page that's reachable from a URL bar, and that data is not something that needs to be passed around with the AGI codebase.
Granted, I personally believe that AGIs are 30+ years away, and I don't think that Wikipedia is enough data for something like a competitive NLP machine using modern technology, but I think that's the direction we will be moving in. We should accept today that AI will be a part of the future, and prepare for the inevitability rather than try to run from it.
The giants are unparalleled in terms of their access to data, and that's something alternatives and competitors can't compete with. It's also clear that for machine learning, having more data is the most effective way to get better results. Stronger algorithms are only going to go so far if your competitor has three or four orders of magnitude more data and computational power.
And that's the scale we are looking at with companies like Facebook and Google.
It seems Apple's lack of engagement in the community [1] is really starting to hurt it. Did anyone else take away from this that the other big players are not including them at the table/considering them real competition?
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-29/apple-s-se...
this partnership thing is a pr move that makes all involved look good. investors and shareholders alike thinkin "cool they're working on ai, that's good"
what will come of the partnership? nothing other than a place journalists can ping for questions about ai.
Taking this into account, I figure Apple thinks twice and thrice before joining industry consortiums and partnerships that they didn't initiate themselves. This would be straightforward posturing/strategizing on their part, and probably doesn't reveal too much about the current state of their R&D in Machine Learning. It's unfortunate that things are this way, but nothing unusual from a "game theory" perspective.
somehow i put them in the same category as LG, Samsung and Sony, albeit 100x better at what they do.
When I saw everyone playing Pokemon Go and buying coins and what have you, I thought of Apple taking a 30% cut of every transaction...
The service revenue really is the strongest case for being a bull. Of course this is just my own personal opinion. I own the stock and I'm long on the prospects. I also love the products. Also so much cash!
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-services-q...
Also, they are ( or at least were) a prime example of a company that can bet on high risk, longish term investments that don't have an immediate application : e.g. their investment in chips, touch technology etc. It may not be as long term as some of the Google X stuff but I don't think it is fair to call them averse to making high risk long term investments.
You're confused. That would be Alphabet, not Apple. To put it in perspective for you, Google has:
~90% of the search market (https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...)
~90% of the smartphone market (https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/gartner-androids-smartphon...)
~50% of the online advertisement market (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Google-Still-Dominates-Worl...)
Hell, Google's staff meets with/at the White House more than once a week! (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3554953/Google-staff...)
I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.
Don't agree? Let's imagine(!) two scenarios.
Scenario 1 - the US Government somehow figures out a way to force Apple to pay all its evaded taxes. Apple doesn't agree, and to make a point how important they are, killswitch everything. Results:
10% of the developed world can't use their phone anymore 10% of the developed world can't use their computer anymore An even smaller subset can't access their e-mail
Scenario 2 - the US Government somehow figures out a way to force Google to pay all its evaded taxes. Google doesn't agree, and to make a point how important they are, killswitch everything. Results:
90% of the developed world can't use their phone anymore 90%+ (Android owners + Gmail, Gcal etc. users) of the developed world can't access their e-mail, calendars, contacts etc. anymore ??% (decently high) of companies/universities can't access their e-mail, calendars etc., because Google Apps is down ??% has trouble navigating because Google Maps goes down (Other maps are still inaccurate and incomplete outside of the US) ??% of companies experience issues by Google Maps+API being down (Uber springs to mind)
Advertising also stops working and paying out (can be switched easily though, so not as critical)
Besides that, Alphabet is also involved in a number of moonshot projects. (Level 4) Self-driving cars. immortality research, AI research, LTE balloons, etc. etc.
The funny part is that I'm typing this on a 13" Retina MBP, with a iPhone 5S in my pocket. I'm by no means a Google fanboy. I love Apple's vertical integration, the amount of synergy and seamlessness their devices have, and that they're championing individual privacy. Also doesn't hurt that compared to Linux, OS X is a godsend to dev on.
I've done enough inebriated rambling so I'm gonna shut up now..
Still gave KAT owner's IP address and all his .icloud e-mails to the FBI without any resistance. WTF?
Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.
The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane.
That can't last. The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.
It seems unlikely they will have another product that generates as much cash as the iPhone.
They will still be a very profitable company, but perhaps not the cash printing machine that we have seen over the last 5 years.
Google Docs, Google +, Google Glass (lol) etc never went anywhere much, revenue wise, and even Android is mostly a loss as far as Google is concerned, even including licenses and mobile ads (makes a good buck for Samsung though).
> The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.
They serve the top end of the market (neither feature phones, not "just give me some smartphone free with the contract") where there are not much competitive pressures and they've been milking more profit than all Android shops combined at that. Besides, that we have been kept hearing since 2008 when Android appeared, and it hasn't even happened in the desktop/laptop space (the sell 5-10% of PCs and get 45% of the PC profits).
Also they've got those cute/silly moonshots that just might pan out.
My interpretation of your post is that Google might be more _important_ than Apple. And my counterargument is that importance is not equivalent to influence.
You just gave some very "flashy & visible" examples of Alphabet's influence while citing only a "big pile of cash" as Apple's flashy & visible trait.
Apple have always been the most secretive and they almost NEVER announce something before they're ready to advertise it.
Did anybody see the New Mac Pro redesign coming? What about the fact that they were developing a whole new language for 4 years before anybody suspected it, Swift? Now it's one of their biggest things ever (one of fastest growing languages on GitHub by some metrics.)
Hell, even the PowerPC to Intel jump could be considered a surprise, even though they had been working on it for 5 years. [1]
Now, just recently they revealed a bunch of stuff powered by offline machine learning in iOS 10 and the macOS Photos — all without sending your info to Apple — and frankly I'm more impressed by this and the differential privacy thing than with Google's efforts towards centralized AI.
If one were to make any guesses, I'd say Apple is in a unique position to build an AI network distributed across all their devices, without leaking privacy to Apple or anyone. This is very attractive to me as a user, even if I have "nothing to hide." There are over a billion iPhones and iPads and Macs combined, with beefier processors on average compared to the majority of Androids. Android's fragmentation may also make it harder for Google to pull off the same, even if they were to make a commitment to user privacy.
I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines. EVEN if Apple is just using it as PR ammo, Google and Facebooks are objectively the worst offenders in this area and they don't look so nice and shiny a People's Champion in a privacy-focused future. It may take just one good open-sourced and distributed search engine, or a newer and more hip social platform (Snapchat looks like a good contender there), to unravel all their prospects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY_ABCZJcpc
> I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines.
It seems like only a minority cares about privacy concerns to even understand them well and take some action. Even when privacy issues make the headlines, billions of people just shrug their shoulders (and perhaps a few thousand say a curse word or two) but still go back to the same old ways they've been using Facebook, Google, etc.
I feel sad that the winds aren't changing direction, or at least not fast enough to be a force to reckon with.
As they have been doing from the beginning. The masses only act contrary to top level input when desperately hungry. Even their righteous anger is scripted and handed down.
What has been the problem is that the critical non-elite core (say 10%) of society was ignorant of the consequences of these technologies and they are now getting a better sense.
We only have to educate the 10% and only need to provide secure software for these same 10%. Societies change when the 10% no longer accepts the rule of the 1%. This is the primary critique against geek efforts to get "grandma" using crypto. If grandma is part of the 10%, she'll be able to follow step by step instructions.
Even during casual conversations with some of my friends who wouldn't be expected to care about these issues, they occasionally let out a glib "Sorry NSA!" whenever they say something that's known to be picked up by their monitoring.
So there is change. There is a chilling effect. And a big player like Apple making a big deal out of it, does help.
Google created Google - they more or less are the internet (that and Facebook) for the world. To 'Google' something is a phrase that entered into the vocabulary a very long time ago. Both their enormous presence in Internet/search, plus more cultural things like Youtube makes it unable to imagine a world without them.
Apple created iPhone. Holy shit, the iPhone. More or less, they invented the smartphone and the ecosystem around it. I really do wonder whether things like Uber would exist if Apple never made iPhone. I doubt Twitter would be as popular. Entire industries have been created now because Apple made iPhone[1].
They're both world-changing companies that have had an enormous impact. This pissing competition of who's bigger and better is so unimportant and just misses the point entirely.
[1] This is actually an interesting thought exercise, for me at least. What would have actually happened if Apple didn't make the iPhone? It's been shown that before release Android pivoted from a Blackberry device (btw, Blackberry just announced they're going to stop making hardware) to a more 'iPhone-like' device once iPhone was announced.
The most favourable approach is that it would have taken Android and Microsoft longer to get to the stage that iPhone was to create the type of influence things like the App Store has.
Maybe Maemo wouldn't have been botched so badly?
I bet that nothing much different, another company would have made one in 1-2 years timeframe. The idea of "hand phone-computer" was very old (decades in sci-fi and real products in nineties called "PDA"). It just happened that around the time when Apple made the first iPhone, tech was advanced and cheap enough for the mass market. To sum up, it was perfect timing, not revolutionary idea.
Before the iPhone was released, the mobile web was a mixture of rudimentary WAP/WML, or if you were lucky awful browsers that tried to render HTML. Everybody hated it.
Then the iPhone was released and it had a web browser in the same ballpark as real desktop browsers. What's more, WebKit was open-source. In next to no time, all the major phone vendors had a WebKit-based browser of their own and the mobile web took off.
Yes, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, eventually we would have gotten decent mobile web browsers. But phone vendors were doing an awful job of it up until Apple moved the whole industry forward. The only other possibility would have been Opera, but that would have required unrealistic licensing deals to have the same impact as the iPhone, and Opera ended up switching to WebKit too.
You're also forgetting about the effect the App Store had on the mobile marketplace. Before the iPhone, buying a mobile application tended to be something that nobody did. Every app had to roll their own payment infrastructure – it was painful for developers to charge and it was painful for customers to pay. Then the App Store came along and made it easy. There was little movement on centralising this beforehand from any other vendor, but as soon as Apple did it, everybody else hopped on the bandwagon.
3G wasn't the deciding factor, the first iPhone didn't have it but responsive sites started popping up right away. There's also no point in 3G for web browsing unless you have a decent rendering engine – WML and XHTML Basic sites were hardly data hogs.
Yeah, that was my thought exactly. However, iPhone software was so radically different from everything else at the time that I still wonder "what" it would have been and what the App Store revolution would have looked like.
Of course, in this alternate universe it's just as likely that other amazing advancements happened because Apple didn't do iPhone.
I am far from Apple fan boy and never actually owned any of their products, but boy they really brought mobile revolution to this world. It took competition many years to catch up with that, with great help of Google and their Android. Main reason why their share price skyrocketed during that time.
Yes, I agree essentially with the above line (though Apple & Alphabet have comparable market values, which is why I said Alphabet has an excellent outlook). I didn't intend to start a minor flame war, as I meant "giant among giants" in the financial sense only, which of course is hugely important.
In terms of influence/clout (measured in eyeballs, political heft, economic clout via product ecosystems, etc.) Alphabet likely does edge out even Apple (perhaps not "far, far beyond"). However & without going into too much detail, I think my point still stands: from a "game theory" angle, there would likely be no strategic reason for Apple to join a partnership in this case.
If Android makes up 90% of the market share and is half as valuable as an iPhone and Google was capturing the same % of value created Google would have revenue numbers from android that are larger than Apples from the iPhone. But it's not even comparable.
Apple and Google are not the only players in this game, but Microsoft as well as others.
Rather than shut stuff off, Google or Apple if forced to pay taxes will just lawyer up and appeal it in some way.
Yeah developing on OSX/MacOS is better than GNU/Linux, but if you find a good IDE with the programming language you use on GNU/Linux it gets better. Plus GNU/Linux runs on the PC Clones out there as well as ported cross platform for ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, Etc.
A reason why I use GNU/Linux is that it is free and respects my rights as a consumer with no DRM, and if I don't like one version of GNU/Linux there are hundreds of others out there. GNU/Linux is not locked to just one brand of computers as MacOS/OSX is, nor does it have DRM and Telemetry in it like Windows 10.
Twitter and Intel missing seems like something to take note of, but I didn't even think twice about Apple. I'm more surprised GE is missing than Apple.
Apple has made a pretty big deal about privacy, but they do collect user data (see the interview a few weeks ago with Apple's mapping lead -saying they are collecting user data to improve maps).
Ultimately if users want ultra smart AI assistants (Siri, Google Now, Cortana, etc.) they will need to give up some of their data.
That may be very unpopular with the HN crowd, but I suspect the vast majority of consumers will be OK with that tradeoff.
Here's an article about that: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-co...
That sums it up nicely, I'm a bit embarrassed those features didn't cross my mind when thinking about Apple/AI. Reinforces your point - its use in invisible, much like their presence in this consortium.
Those features have been on Android forever, but people don't call it "AI".
Mind you, I don't have an Android device, so maybe Google Maps does this automatically for you on Andriod. It doesn't do it on the iPhone, at least not automatically (aka. I don't bother to look it up, which is kind of the point).
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6015842?hl=en
Google Now generally seems to be where all that automated stuff goes, so if you don't use it that would explain why you don't see any of it.
Cross referenced it, because Cortana can't do it in iOS for that reason
If you started moving at 70KM/h nowhere near a train or bus station, and then suddenly stopped moving at that speed and shortly after started moving at 5KM/h, you've clearly just got out of your car. Use bluetooth for extra verification if possible. When certain, get location (or load location) from GPS and mark spot. Tadaa, no fancy learning model needed.
edit: anyway, besides the point.. I just love that feature haha
It is a nice feature indeed
Then those webchat and help desk jobs will be gone and replaced with AI doing robocalls and acting like a chatbot.
I'm getting Robocalls that ask for a Chris or something and as soon as I say there is nobody here by that name (so they can take me off their list) the bot cuts in saying "Maybe you can help?" and then tries to sell me something. Most of the time the Caller ID is spoofed and it calls back with a different Caller ID and number, etc. I'm on the Dot not call list, but Robocallers just war dial numbers until it reaches someone and then tries to hook them in.
Not only that but AI can take the jobs of writers, programmers, managers, legal assistants, and in robot form burger flippers and checkout kiosks.
As we reach 2020-2030 the AI is trying to get as smart as a human being. As long as it has electricity it can work 24/7 without getting tired or hungry like a human being would.
That's why Apple is out. It doesn't waste it's money.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6251220/guy-osear...
Does anyone contest that Facebook's AI is going to pull apart their user's public social feeds and private FB conversations to advance their own business model?
A unification of a large group of tech companies could even be seen as an anti-OpenAI. A singleton could certainly emerge as a co-operation between multiple large corporations and/or a government. An Amazon & Google partnership is particularly terrifying considering how much computing power could be rolled over to a unified AI almost instantaneously.
We do not need an organization engaged in PR for for-profit companies attempting to placate the public while lobbying regulators while unleashing their AI on the public at large. That is what this looks like. We've seen their business ethics already. It isn't a good template moving forward.
I would be less cynical if I heard anyone else besides Apple taking a public stand on keeping personal data private and AI contained in boxes. There does need to be AI ethics and safety leaders, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon should be following not in the lead.
Since you didn't explicitly state whom it will hurt, the devil in me reads this sentence as Apple's involvement (or lack of it) will hurt all people. :)
"Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on marketing"