There has been some buzz lately that Apple is out of the A.I. race because they value privacy too much and, as a result, don’t collect the data needed to win in an A.I. / Big Data world. I don’t buy it. The artificial intelligence space is moving very very quickly and I think Apple is well placed for where it is going.
First of all, Apple has a great developer ecosystem, and as I wrote about here, that ecosystem is going to be valuable as A.I. (particularly in the digital assistant space) move from the “understanding” phase, to the “doing” phase. When you look at Siri vs. Cortana vs. M vs. Echo vs. whatever-else-is-coming, the Apple developer ecosystem will, now that Siri is open, build the most stuff into Siri. If a year from now Siri does the most stuff, that’s a big win for Apple, even if Siri’s NLP is a sliver worse than the best player on the market (probably Amazon).
Secondly, we may see A.I. move more to the hardware level. Google recently built a custom A.I. chip. Of the big players in the A.I. space, who has the most experience with custom hardware? Apple does. I would not be surprised to hear about an Apple A.I. hardware announcement in the next 12 months.
Finally, there are some problems in machine learning that will be solved that Facebook and Google have less incentive to solve. For example, what will happen with machine learning for “small data”? It’s logical that machine learning will go there, because, I don’t have to show a 4 year old child 5,000 coffee cups before she understands what a coffee cup is. How do we replicate that experience in software?
Well, companies tend to have core philosophies, and those core philosophies are based on leveraging the assets they have. Google and Facebook have massive data sets. So they work on A.I. that leverages those data sets. I don’t know how they think about those data sets internally, but my guess is that they overvalue them. As a result, they have little incentive to look into machine learning for small data. Apple, on the other hand, has tons of incentive to do so. And there are many many many problems in A.I. that are currently unsolved only because no one has taken a deep look to do so. Apple may be well positioned, and appropriately incentivized, to leapfrog everyone else and lead the world in “small data” A.I.
I have zero insight into what is going on at Apple, so I don’t know if any of this is true. I’m just saying that there are a lot of pundits predicting the decline of Apple because of the rise of A.I., but there is a plausible story for why Apple will be very competitive there.
