The New York Times published yesterday (3) information about the new hire of Apple in order to improve its Siri digital assistant. This is the engineer and former head of research and artificial intelligence at Google, John Giannandrea. Apparently the hiring came a day after the executive announced his resignation from his position at Google.
Apple has been trying for a while to make progress on rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, with computer vision and natural language processing. The company is slightly behind the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft in terms of AI. As such, Giannandrea will report directly to Tim Cook, CEO of the company, and will lead "Machine Learning and AI Strategy".
In an email obtained by the New York Times, Tim Cook informs Apple of the hire saying that he "shares our commitment to customer privacy and our meticulous approach."
Apple's competition proves to be much more powerful in the field of AI, with a large number of programmers working in various assignments publishing articles that help the collective AI research community. The apple company, on the other hand, didn't have access to any data or resources that aid in AI development in the same way rival companies did, until September 2016, when it started allowing employees to publish their research themselves.
In this context, the ones who suffer from the lack of updates are Siri, which is often the butt of jokes for its lack of sophistication in relation to the Google Assistant, and even Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. That's where Giannandrea comes in, who by joining the group will be able to recruit more high-level talent to the team, improving the algorithms. The company has always wanted to achieve this feat, without needing to achieve or violate its stance on privacy.
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According to The Verge, industry experts say Apple's approach to data collection and user privacy is ideologically commendable, but ends up hampering its ability to keep pace with competitors.
In place of Giannandrea was Google veteran Jeff Dean, considered one of the talents in the coding world. For that reason, Google shouldn't be too impacted by Giannandrea's dismissal. Some anonymous sources who work at Google told The Verge that the company's feeling is that Dean has a "stronger relationship" with the community, employees and management.
Dean is now in charge of Google's entire AI unit, which has spun off the research part to focus on AI that will be implemented in products and long-term research.
Fontes: The Verge e The New York Times
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