Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by sterlind on Thursday January 24, 2019 @03:24AM (#18986915)

Are you suggesting Apple plans to do AI without harvesting data, or with transparent privacy controls on data? There's literally nothing for machine learning to learn besides harvested data. It's like suggesting that a power company is trying the strategy of using no wires for delivering electricity to houses..

I'd be excited if Apple found a way to trustlessly aggregate data and perform homomorphic training of their ML models, but they seem to be laying off that flavor of talent..

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Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by simonh on Thursday January 24, 2019 @03:32AM (#18986962)

It's actually not that Apple isn't collecting data sets, but they're doing so at a more measured pace by thoroughly anonymising it using differential privacy. If the AI needs to use raw personal data in it's calculations, that is done on the user's device to keep that information private.

This appears to be slowing them down compared to their competitors, but it's not clear how much as against them being a bit behind for other reasons.

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Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by mda on Thursday January 24, 2019 @08:43AM (#18988546)

Others also anonimyzes data using differential privacy, k anonymity etc. It is a common practice and enforced when working with private / PII data.

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Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by mcintyre1994 on Thursday January 24, 2019 @04:34AM (#18987218)

Is this what their differential privacy stuff is about? It's not trustless (not least because 100% of the data comes from a closed source OS they control) but they do seem to be trying to figure out a privacy-friendly way to harvest data to train ML models.

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Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by TheCoelacanth on Thursday January 24, 2019 @10:58AM (#18989755)

You seem to be equating AI and statistics-based ML. Statistics-based ML is certainly producing the most results of any AI technique right now, but it is not necessarily the only one that ever will.

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Re:Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit by JimDabell on Thursday January 24, 2019 @04:04AM (#18987090)

> There's literally nothing for machine learning to learn besides harvested data.

You can obtain training data from sources other than your customers. Apple have employees driving vans around with cameras and LIDAR.

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