Apple Hires Google's Chief of Search and Artificial Intelligence

[techwhiz]

That's not what he was asking about. What you're quoting was about an agreement between companies to not hire each others' current employees. That's illegal nationwide. Antitrust violation.

What he was inquiring about was an agreement between a company and an employee that limits the employee's ability to work for a competitor down the line for a certain amount of time and/or within a certain geographic area. The legality and enforceability of such agreements varies by state, with them being basically unenforceable in California.

Exactly.
I work in Silicon Valley and non-compete agreements need to be printed on four inch square, soft paper, in rolls.
Things like agreements not to sue in a reduction in force are not legal. "If you don't sign this agreement, we won't give you your state mandated severance." If that signing isn't coerced nothing is.

Really the only agreements like that that are enforceable are NDA and some assignment of inventions done on company time or with company resources.

Anyway:
Apple has a new executive and Google lost him.
That's how employment works.

 

[The Game 161]

Makes iOS 12 improvements with Siri seem possible after all now

 

[Defthand]

Don't get too excited. Apple recruits some of the most credentialed experts around and still struggles to maintain its polish. Some of Apple's defining contributors—the fathers of what we equate as the Apple approach—left to pursue other challenges. The brainiacs Apple replaces them with aren't necessarily imaginative nor empathetic. When a visionary like Jimmy Iovine feels restrained by a company that once embraced mavericks, you know something has changed. Even cofounder Steve Wozniack said that he and Steve Jobs would not be hired by today's Apple.

 

[KPandian1]

What do you mean?

Apple has our data and uses it internally for its own products. Google has made all this money by selling data to anybody who will pay, and pretty much almost nothing else.

If Apple follows Google's method of generating revenue from selling data, its revenue will multiply without them having to make any product - hardware or software. It is already a high profit company, so the stock price will go thru the ceiling again, possibly hit $1000+ again.

 

[Ilikechainrestaurants]

Maybe Siri will finally become usable. Can they hire the Google Maps person too so Maps can become usable?

This x100

The whole process of using Siri to try and call up navigation to somewhere is unbelievably bad.

"Siri, navigate to QuikTrip"

"I found QuikTrip located 637 miles away"

That's assuming she got the name right (which Google almost always does). And even if it's the right location, the directions are laughably bad.

 

[mudflap]

Uber is a pretty dirty company in general.

Uber is beyond filthy. I refuse to use them. Thankfully in Chicago we have Lyft.

 

[Baymowe335]

Then how do you expect to build an AI system without user data? How do you expect Siri to know you when it doesnt know anything about the user? Some smart agent eh?

Going back the topic on hand, this site and many of the other tech blogs are blowing things out of proportion. John isnt a great hire for Apple when it comes to improving Siri. His big contribution to Apple may be more toward search technology then AI. He wasnt part of the original group in the AI department. He was a third party when Google bought his company.

The question is, do users care? I actually think Siri is perfect for my needs. Google Assistant might do some things that you ask it, but will you ever ask those things outside of a testing scenario?

AI can do a lot more than just answer questions and does not necessarily need user data.

 

[ipponrg]

The question is, do users care? I actually think Siri is perfect for my needs. Google Assistant might do some things that you ask it, but will you ever ask those things outside of a testing scenario?

AI can do a lot more than just answer questions and does not necessarily need user data.

Yep, users do care. Aren't we all users? There are plenty that find Siri unsatisfactory for their needs. Perhaps my camp has more users that dislike Siri vs your camp. In the end though, we're all users

 

[Whathappened]

Whoa, if Apple gets into the "Search" business Google could be in trouble.

Google is not in the “search” business but in the data collecting business and just a few days ago, Tim pointed out that Apple won’t walk that path.

 

[rafark]

Not at all. Apple saw more value in the guy than google did. The man has the right to go wherever he wants.

We do not know. But when you take a high executive from your #1 'enemy', it isn't the most ethical thing to do, no matter its legality.

 

[JAdmiral]

So you could like work 5 years at Daimler and then move on to VW and be like „at daimler we were working on this and that by doing these things that way“? Crazy to me

Not to be confused with non-disclosure policies. He's still, I'm sure, bound not to reveal Google trade secrets.

Good luck being able to prove it, tho.

Also, correct on California and the non-competes.

 

[alexhardaker]

Due to privacy issues, I wish Apple would not record and keep a recording of our voices and commands to Siri in the future. Its just creepy

I believe I remember reading/hearing they keep it associated with you for 6 months or 2 years or something. The new privacy splash screens do not mention this at all

 

[giffut]

While Apple has almost unlimited finances at their hands, the factual usage of those also must produce results. The last 10 years have shown, that Apple is not as cloud and machine learning savy as Google or Amazon. They mainly lack the managmental focus and resources; and that is the single reason why Siri e.g. never takes off - or still tries to do, depending your perspective.

 

[KPandian1]

While Apple has almost unlimited finances at their hands, the factual usage of those also must produce results. The last 10 years have shown, that Apple is not as cloud and machine learning savy as Google or Amazon. They mainly lack the managmental focus and resources; and that is the single reason why Siri e.g. never takes off - or still tries to do, depending your perspective.

Apple doesn't play freely with the clients data - main reason for Siri's lag behind the others.

I prefer that Siri does NOT order up my liquor stock; it will devolve to drugs (of all kinds) next.

 

[deadoctopi]

Finally. I'm glad Apple is taking a step to fix Siri but I imagine its going to take a year or two to see results.

True. and that’s better than however many years it’s taken it to basically not find people in my contacts, when i ask for directions to a particular spot it finds options i didn’t even ask for, etc etc. still an overall clunky mess to use in the car hands free. have to bark through multiple levels of failure.

 

[cmaier]

Exactly.
I work in Silicon Valley and non-compete agreements need to be printed on four inch square, soft paper, in rolls.
Things like agreements not to sue in a reduction in force are not legal. "If you don't sign this agreement, we won't give you your state mandated severance." If that signing isn't coerced nothing is.

Really the only agreements like that that are enforceable are NDA and some assignment of inventions done on company time or with company resources.

Anyway:
Apple has a new executive and Google lost him.
That's how employment works.

What “state mandated severance” in California?

 

[DeepIn2U]

Giannandrea's hiring comes as Apple has recently faced criticism for Siri, the AI-based personal assistant built into products like Macs, iPhones, iPads, the Apple TV, and the HomePod. Many believe Siri has serious shortcomings in comparison to AI offerings from other companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google due to Apple's heavy focus on privacy.

Recently. Recently? Recently? ..... seriously, recently?!

(I'm unsure if I should ROFLMAO or cry miserably, simply with the inclusion and use of that word in this post, in that exact sentence above in the context refering to Sori, ahem Siri. Funny I made that typo on my iPhone 7 just once and it seems to have stuck, appropriately so.)

In recent years, Apple has been bolstering its artificial intelligence team. In 2016, the company hired Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov to lead a team focused on artificial intelligence, and in October, Apple acqui-hired the team from Init.ai, a customer service startup focused on creating AI with natural language processing and machine learning to analyze chat-based conversations between humans.
Article Link: Apple Hires Google's Chief of Search and Artificial Intelligence

IF the first major redux or overhaul of Siri is to learn and appropriate better information from Apple Support chats with customers or show much relevant threads and appropriate fixes to issues within support.apple.com forums I'll patiently wait another year for Siri to knock all other AI's out of the park. Being dead serious about this.

Here's to praying Siri gets a proper new life and leads consistently into the future cause that Apple Watch paired with Apple lenses isn't going to be fruitful to the end user or Apple if it remains paired to an iPhone. Siri is a MUST for such future devices and use cases. Forget the iPad being a Mac replacement.

PS: I'm starting to feel MacOS looking ... dated.

 

[springsup]

Then how do you expect to build an AI system without user data? How do you expect Siri to know you when it doesnt know anything about the user? Some smart agent eh?

Going back the topic on hand, this site and many of the other tech blogs are blowing things out of proportion. John isnt a great hire for Apple when it comes to improving Siri. His big contribution to Apple may be more toward search technology then AI. He wasnt part of the original group in the AI department. He was a third party when Google bought his company.

Apple actually has a very good answer for this: machine learning.

Here are the talks (if you're not a developer, just ignore the code stuff - the examples are amazing enough!):
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/703/
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/710/

Here are some of the things machine learning is enabling today in iOS:
- Photo search: e.g. "roses", "ball" or "dog"
- Image captioning: e.g. photo -> "dog in a field playing with a ball"
- Language recognition: e.g. "...." -> Spanish
- Object tracking: (they have an amazing video of tracking a bunch of grapes on a windy day)
- Object detection: (they have a jaw-dropping video where they go around a house, and the camera recognises his integrated kitchen appliances as "fridge" or "microwave" and detects a "banana" in real-time)
- Apple Watch handwriting recognition (in my experience, incredibly accurate)

The most amazing thing is that every one of these features is 100% offline, on-device processing. They are not sending your text to a server to detect the language, or your image to generate a caption, like Google might do.

Instead, Apple create neural-networks which train machine-learning models which you download and run as part of an App which uses these features. They gather data from iOS devices to train the models and improve them - but, and this is the key difference - that data is anonymised and sampled together random junk, so Apple can't trace it back to you (and it's deleted after a short period of time, once the model doesn't need it any more).

You can also create and train your own models (there is already a big community doing this, before Apple), and they have tools which allow you to easily integrate pre-trained models from the research community.

They can also do some limited training on-device, so the model will evolve to suit you. That's what the keyboard does, for example.

 

[fairuz]

I'm very curious as to why he left Google. Insider deal, or was there something he hated there?
[doublepost=1522911949][/doublepost]

We do not know. But when you take a high executive from your #1 'enemy', it isn't the most ethical thing to do, no matter its legality.

The ethics are on him for leaving the company he's worked at for so long.
[doublepost=1522912080][/doublepost]

The question is, do users care? I actually think Siri is perfect for my needs. Google Assistant might do some things that you ask it, but will you ever ask those things outside of a testing scenario?

AI can do a lot more than just answer questions and does not necessarily need user data.

I agree, never had a problem with Siri that relates to lack of user data. And it understands voices well now. I only wish the Apple Maps data it uses had more places of interest, but they're slowly getting there.

 

[enc0re]

There’s nothing unethical about leaving your employer for another job. There’s nothing unethical about hiring a competitor’s employee. And the number one reason to switch jobs is to make more money.

It’s a free market and that’s a good thing.

 

[diarbyrag]

Some days I think Apple needs some ACTUAL Intellingence, not the Artificial stuff...

 

[mi7chy]

These hirings are more to appease shareholders than to benefit end users. Even if it did it'll be at least two years before seeing any signs of Siri improvement and by then his stock option would have vested and he'll jump ship. Siri didn't improve with the last Carnegie Mellon AI hiring and actually got worse.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sirifail

 

[giffut]

Apple doesn't play freely with the clients data - main reason for Siri's lag behind the others.

I prefer that Siri does NOT order up my liquor stock; it will devolve to drugs (of all kinds) next.

Siris AI is technically inferior, it got nothing to do with the data itself.

 

[VictorTango777]

I realise that this will most definitely not happen though as Google has years of experience and is pretty much ingrained into everyone’s head and within pop culture as the only search engine for the entire internet but I can dream.

Tunnel vision is not unique to Google users.

 

[iop]

They

This is a huge move. AI and machine learning is the next big thing and it deserves its own umbrella at Apple.

They lost a lot of momentum by not prioritizing machine learning sooner. Google is ahead of everyone, and, to be honest, I am not sure Siri will be able to catch up with Google ai.