Many other companies are mature enough to show their cards but Apple keeps declaring victory. Apple writes its own narrative instead of participating.

There are mature ways for this to shake out and they don't include your strawman dichotomy.

But why? Who cares about papers, source code or numbers beyond the tiny segment that HN caters to? Apple has always been about the user experience. When they discuss a vast majority of prior accomplishments they discuss them, many times, in terms of the layman. Does that mean they can't manufacture? Nope. AI is simply harder to show without the papers / source code you mention but this isn't typical Apple to release that.

I honestly don't think they care to go beyond the level of details outlined here. I interviewed with the Siri team twice now and they certainly have some incredibly smart people. Whether they're "winning" against Google, Microsoft or whoever? I say who cares. They want to control their narrative without divulging too much detail like they have always done.

I don't know, say, the thousands of future engineers and researchers, that, you know, make the product?

Apple hasn't needed to do that with engineers and researchers pretty much ever; now with AI it's different? Maybe it won't help attract some small portion of people but I'm not sure why it supposedly matters now where it hasn't in the past.

Why do they need to? At the end of the day all that matters is that the products they ship are good and aren't lacking compared to competitors. The only reason they would provide evidence for what they claim other than that is to appease people calling bullshit and unless it's effecting sales no company should stoop to that.

Safari and WebKit has 100% support for ES6, which is more than any other browser - http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

I think what you mean is Safari doesn't support the standards you want it to support, some of which aren't actually full standards yet but candidates.

(And I'm not even going to touch the frankly invidious IE comparison.)

I grant testing is an issue if you don't own Apple hardware, although there are free and inexpensive remote testing services which cover that need well, and I'm certainly not about to say that Safari doesn't pose any unique difficulties to the web developer. But so does every other browser.

Common problems include items not syncing, syncing out of time order, and conflict resolution causing synced data to appear lost. Most devs that are really serious about sync tend to roll their own after experiencing enough issues to make iCloud not worth the effort.

This is entirely based on my experience and may not be universally true but I've heard enough devs repeat my own complaints to feel like it's not completely out for left field.

Safari is perfect for my use cases. Way better battery life, feels lighter than chrome, etc, etc.

What exactly in your opinion is worse about modern safari and maps that makes a worse experience for the user?

I disagree - they are not making any claims that they care to be validated. They don't care to be 'known as #1' in whatever field. We can believe what we want as far as they are concerned.

'If they are serious' - they will make this technology work to make better experiences for end consumers.

'The proof is in the pudding' - so to speak.

I for one don't doubt that their AI 'increased the intelligence of Siri'. But I also don't care about Siri and find it basically useless. AI has different kinds of impacts in different domains. If they make better experiences for us - all the power to them. If not, then not ...

They have themselves to blame, at least partially since they painted themselves into a corner. A while back they went on a media offensive proclaiming how "data-mining" the user's information is bad, and they won't stand for it in the interest of privacy... As it turns out, reality is a little more nuanced, and a bit of applied AI is in fact good for the user experience. e.g. your phone can't tell you were you parked your car unless it knows your location, and when you stopped driving.

I see this article as Apple PR rolling back on the previous position which inadvertently made Apple look like a company being overtaken by recent technological developments.

It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy. And that the fact that they deny AI researchers big hoards of data, hurts their reputation in the AI community, because most AI researchers want mountains of data.

My question are: A. who is violating user's privacy, B. How is Apple any different[1] from them, besides proclaiming they aren't violating privacy?

1. Some data is collected from the device and sent to a server for processing. Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device), they are just like every other company that opens up user's data to 'ex-filtration' by third parties.

[1]: http://www.recode.net/2016/6/24/11967188/apple-data-collecti...

This is exactly what Apple does, which should answer question B.

That is not true, even the puff-piece article admits as much if you read it carefully. This can be proven trivially: is Siri processed locally?

> Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device)

You can call it trivial, I will argue otherwise. No one knows outside of Apple how big a percentage cloud-based processing is, but my point remains - Apple's does what everyone else is doing, the only difference is proportion.

Let's start with Apple's narrative. Throughout the piece, there is no direct quote mentioning any Apple innovation. The quotes are actually fairly weak:

“We’ve been seeing over the last five years a growth of this inside Apple”

“I loved [publishing at Microsoft Research] and published many papers. But when Siri came out I said this is a chance to make these deep neural networks all a reality”

“Speech is an excellent example where we applied stuff available externally to get it off the ground.”

What I get from it is that Apple has started following Google's, Microsoft's and Facebook's lead in the past five years, and has a few knowledgeable employees reusing and combining algorithms published in papers from other companies or academia.

But fundamentally, the reason they perform this PR is to start being viewed as knowledgeable in the field, so that when they release self-driving cars in 2017 or 2018, the public trusts them.

And to let us know that they're hiring: “Though today we certainly hire many machine learning people, we also look for people with the right core aptitudes and talents.” The hint is not subtle.

Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position (generally satisfied iphone owner). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not everybody is satisfied with "good enough" isn't a reason to silence discussion. Particularly when as a brand they're pitched as high end rather than just good enough.

It basically happens to every company, nothing to be sad about.

Yes - those in the field who prefer to publish will not be willing to join Apple. How much of an opportunity cost this is to Apple remains an open question.

> “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi.

And I think they may be right. Researchers often aren't the best product creators.

You NEED researchers to build a robust autonomous vehicle or speech recognition system. Hell, you know how many electrical and materials scientists they have working on the iPhone?

Physical products actually requires science and research. Designing a responsive landing page does not.

Edison and Ford vs Einstein and Faraday.

This is a blatantly false dichotomy: there's nothing about publishing that precludes anyone from "working as a team to deliver a great product"

> Researchers often aren't the best product creators.

Tell that to Andrew Ng!

He's made enormous contributions to human knowledge, but doesn't seem to be interested in the hard work of bringing a product to market.

He even left Coursera to return to theory.

what exactly do you define as "the hard work of bringing a product to market"? To me, his work at Google certainly applies as bringing a product to market - the cat recognition deeplearning AI is a product.

That led to an interesting paper and a lot of potential applications.

By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications.

> By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications

I'll have to disagree - "perfecting the product" is one of many roles required to bring a product to market. Other roles that are just as important are "dreamer/visionary", "practical starter/founder", "scale-up person". Sometimes one person can assume multiple roles, but rarely all roles, all of them are hard work.

Any company who want to win in the long run will have to take control of machine learning as a central part of their culture.