Apple to start publishing its AI research

Apple's AI research department will throw open its research and start publishing papers, Bloomberg reported. An "announcement" to the effect came from the IT giant's newly-hired director of AI research news during his presentation at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona on Monday.

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a Carnegie Mellon associate professor in machine learning who joined Apple in October, showed a slide that read, "Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes."

According to commentators, this comes as an abrupt change for Apple, which had so far, kept all its research results in-house.

They add, this could allow Apple to advance its research more quickly by engaging with other academics.

Rival tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, which allowed their employees to publish their research, had caught up and  possibly even overtaken Siri. Also Google had made major advances with its AI Experiments and DeepMind research.

Further, allowing employees to publish was a good way to attract talent to the team, as publication allowed researchers to share their hard work and achievements.

According to Salakhutdinov, the move is aimed at attracting and retaining top talent in the industry. Unlike some areas in tech which Apple could keep behind closed doors, collaboration had proved highly rewarding in AI development. Many of the top AI researchers attended industry conferences, published papers, and contributed to open-source projects which aimed to deliver safe and careful development of machine intelligence. Apple, on the other hand, had walled-in its employees in Cupertino.

According to Yann LeCun, an industry veteran who headed Facebook's AI division, publishing was paramount for researchers. ''You can't tell people 'come work for us but you can't tell people what you're doing' because you basically ruin their career,'' he told Business Insider. ''That's a big element.''