Just last month, Apple said it will allow its artificial intelligence teams to publish research papers for the first time, marking a significant change in strategy that could help accelerate the iPhone maker’s advances in deep learning. Now, Apple is making good on that promise, as the company published its very first research paper on artificial intelligence on December 22.
The paper “describes a technique for how to improve the training of an algorithm’s ability to recognize images using computer-generated images rather than real-world images,” reads Forbes’ report on the publication.
When Apple introduced its Siri virtual assistant in 2011, the company appeared to have a head start over many of its nearest competitors. But it has lost ground since then to the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google Assistant and Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa.
Researchers say among the reasons Apple has failed to keep pace was its unwillingness to allow its AI engineers to publish scientific papers, stymieing its ability to feed off wider advances in the field.
That policy has now changed, Russ Salakhutdinov, an Apple director of AI research, said previously at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona, according to Twitter posts from those in the audience. One attendee posted a photo of a slide from Salakhutdinov’s presentation stating “Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes.”
