Apple’s artificial intelligence researchers are to begin publishing research papers, which could help accelerate the company’s advances in deep learning.
The announcement was made at the recent NIPS conference by Russ Salakhutdinov, director of AI research at Apple, as several tweets from attendees highlighted.
One tweet included a photo of a slide posted on twitter from Salakhutdinov’s presentation, which stated “Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes.”
According to Business Insider, Yann LeCunn, Facebook’s AI director, told the company prior to the announcement that Apple’s closed off approach could hinder its ability to hire the best people in the field of AI.
When describing how he gets the most talented software engineers to work on Facebook’s AI efforts, LeCunn added: “Offering researchers the possibility of doing open research, which is publishing their work.”
Apple appears to be developing other routes of artificial intelligence and machine learning, beyond Siri. It is also possible that the company may look to develop AI for autonomous cars and other products that are yet to be announced.
Apple joins Google and Elon Musk who recently made the move to make their AI research open source and available to developers. Elon Musk’s OpenAI said that it will release a software platform called Universe for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across games, websites and other applications. Gogle’s DeepMind, meanwhile, plans to open-source DeepMind lab, a fully 3D game-like platform tailored for agent-based AI research.
