Apple’s artificial intelligence researchers are planning to start publishing some of their previous work as well as engage on a higher level with more academics regarding AI in general, according to a new report from Business Insider.
Russ Salakhutd, the director of artificial intelligence research at Apple and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, made the official announcement at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference on Tuesday, according to a number of tweets from conference attendees.
A number of different companies, like Google and Facebook, have already allowed many of their their employees to publish their research in all sorts of fields, including AI.
Cupertino has historically kept its research to itself, considering any developments in its research valuable intellectual property, so this change of mind is quite a drastic shift for the tech giant.
Facebook’s AI director, Yann LeCun said just last month that Apple’s closed-off approach to publishing its research will eventually hinder the company’s AI development, as well as its ability to hire some of the best research and development talent in the field.
“In fact, at FAIR [Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research], it’s not just a possibility, it’s a requirement,” said LeCun. “So, [when] you’re a researcher, you assume that you’re going to publish your work. It’s very important for a scientist because the currency of the career as a scientist is the intellectual impact. So 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. That’s a big element.”
Apple has yet to make any official statement regarding the matter.
