Obsession with secrets may be hampering the development of artificial intelligence technologies at Apple

It is not new to anyone that now, more than ever, Apple is very interested in developing its own artificial intelligence the talent hires in the area and the acquisitions of several specialized companies do not let me lie. Obviously, the fruits of this endeavor are diverse and succulent: with a strong AI team, Ma can improve services such as Siri, Apple Music and its Maps, bring improvements to its various products and even pave the way for new categories somebody to talked about autonomous steering system?

The fact that Ma is not alone in this race, quite the contrary: competitors like Microsoft, Google and Facebook they've been investing heavily in artificial intelligence for much longer than Tim Cook's gang; so, all of these companies are reasonably ahead of Apple on a number of issues related to the subject. However, a reason for this delay by Apple, raised recently by the Wall Street Journal, has (almost) nothing to do with the competition.

According to the report (exclusive to subscribers), Apple's tradition of keeping all its projects and research under a high level of secrecy may be the stone tied to the company's ankle in the eternal race in search of perfect artificial intelligence.

This is because developing, say, a new iPhone model is very different from conducting research related to any scientific field, such as artificial intelligence. In the academic world, new discoveries are immediately shared with the community in scientific articles; scientists and engineers from different laboratories or universities communicate intensively and continuously with each other for collaborations or assistance and knowledge treated as a universal good. Apple, as we well know, does not work that way.

Apparently, Ma engineers, scientists and executives would be having a hard time adapting to this more open world. Just to give you an idea, this hideous chart of WSJ shows the amount of scientific articles published by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple in 2016 and 2017:

Scientific articles published by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple in 2016 and 2017

While Microsoft fires as the absolute leader of the issue and Google / Facebook vies for second place, all with hundreds of published documents, Apple only produced an article in 2016 and three this year, so far. Well, it's still an evolution, right?

In the end, after all, Apple seems to be struggling to adapt to this status quo the blog on machine learning (which, incidentally, houses some of the articles counted in the chart above) is a clear example of this. If it is too late to make up for lost time, however, that is only time to say.

via The Next Web