General Intelligence

Apple’s A.I. Research Team Is Playing Catch-Up With Siri

And other recent Apple A.I. research projects

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
4 min readOct 16, 2020

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Photo illustration source: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Like every big tech company, Apple is in dire need of A.I. programmers. These algorithms serve as a foundation for everything from processing photos to make them look brighter and sharper to powering Siri to maybe even driving that Apple car.

So, in 2016, the company hired a well-known Carnegie Mellon professor named Ruslan Salakhutdinov to lead its A.I. division and, in a surprising move by the typically tight-lipped company, launched a research blog to publish some of its own work.

Apple makes some of its work public because the backbone of the A.I. field is still academic, and the ability to publish new research is a primary consideration for PhDs entering the world of tech.

“You can’t tell people, ‘Come work for us, but you can’t tell people what you’re doing,’ because you basically ruin their career,” Facebook chief scientist Yann LeCun told Business Insider in 2016.

Four years later, Apple is still publishing on its research blog, giving some up-to-date…

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.