Apple might attribute its success to a deep-rooted secrecy, but such culture might hurt its efforts in at least one sector-- artificial intelligence, as the company refuses to play balls with other industry players.
According to Bloomberg, while employees from giants such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and even China's Baidu take part in the Neural Information Processing Systems 2015 conference, Apple attendees are notably absent. Apple researchers did attend the 2014 conference, only to keep a low profile and not disclose their company unless asked.
“Apple is off the scale in terms of secrecy,” University of Toronto researcher Richard Zemel tells Bloomberg. “They’re completely out of the loop.”
Secrecy is so ingrained at Apple that AI researchers lock their office doors whenever leaving the office, and AI teams are not allowed what similar teams within the company are doing. So far so Apple, but one has to admit Siri and Apple Maps still lag behind the predictive likes of Google Maps and Microsoft's Cortana.
Such secrecy also hurts Apple in the search of hires-- both "really strong" and researchers promising graduate students prefer to maintain a presence in the scientific community, and to do so one needs to publish papers and attend conferences. Which is why Google is opening a residency program for for AI researchers, and even the infamously secretive Amazon allows researchers to publish papers.
Mind, Apple is still pushing on AI, if in its own way. A few months ago the company bought a pair of AI-related startups, namely natural language processing specialist VocalIQ and auto systems development Perceptio.
