Apple wants you to know that it loves AI more than you realize

[Suarez™]

Apple has been busy snapping up dozens of AI startups, and its Siri product is one of the most-widely-used AI applications on the planet, but recent AI headlines have focused on more glamorous efforts — especially from competitors Google and Facebook. Both Google and Facebook have released major AI technologies into open source, and Google’s DeepMind famously tackled the challenge of Go, by beating one of the world’s best players. So Apple took the very unusual step of spending an entire day bragging about its AI efforts to journalist Steven Levy, who published a very-thorough account on Backchannel.

The article reads more like an inventory than a coherent strategy document. There are long lists of AI technologies, AI-infused Apple products, acquired startups, and key hires. So it is a little hard to connect all the dots and discern exactly which technologies are in use in which products, but one clear take away is that the neural network renaissance has had the same disruptive effect on Siri — when it moved to neural nets in 2014 — and other Apple efforts as it has for Google’s speech recognition, Facebook’s facial recognition, and plenty of other fields. Apple says Siri’s accuracy more than doubled when it made the switch, which is fairly consistent with the progress Google has made for its “OK Google” voice recognition through adoption of similar technologies — a couple years earlier.