Apple's AI research department is going to be breaking its long silence and start publishing papers, according to a report by Bloomberg. The tech giant's newly hired director of AI research delivered the 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 was hired by Apple in October, showed a slide that read, "Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes." This is considered an abrupt change for Apple, which previously kept all its research results in-house.
This could allow Apple to advance its research more quickly by engaging with other academics. Rival tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, which do allow their employees to publish their research, have caught up to and possibly even outstripped Siri. In addition, Google has made big waves this year with its AI Experiments and DeepMind research.
In addition to the collaboration benefits, allowing employees to publish is a good way to attract talent to the team, as publication allows researchers to share their hard work and achievements.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.