Apple is finally going to start publishing its AI research
Russ Salakhutd, director of AI research at Apple and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, made the announcement at the NIPS conference in on Tuesday, according to a series of tweets from conference attendees.
The Californian tech giant has traditionally kept research breakthroughs to itself, seeing any developments as valuable intellectual property (IP), so this is a major change in direction.
Companies like Google and Facebook already allow their employees to publish their research across a number of fields, including AI.
Yann LeCun, Facebook's AI director, told Business Insider last month that Apple's closed off approach could hinder its ability to hire the best people in the field of AI.
Describing how he gets the most talented software engineers in the world to come and work on Facebook's AI efforts, LeCun said: "Offering researchers the possibility of doing open research, which is publishing their work.
"In fact, at FAIR [Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research], it's not just a possibility, it's a requirement," he said in London. "So, [when] you're a researcher, you assume that you're going to publish your work. It's very important for a scientist because the currency of the career as a scientist is the intellectual impact. So 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. That's a big element."
Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.