TheNextWeb: Tristan Greene on Apple Losing Ian Goodfellow
TNW's Tristan Greene shared his thoughts on Ian Goodfellow's departure from Apple saying that it was "the dumbest thing Apple has ever done".
A little over a week ago, it became known that Ian Goodfellow has left Apple, where he served as a director of machine learning. He worked for the company for a little more than three years, and reportedly broke the news to staff in an email, saying that his departure is partly caused by Apple's plan to return to work from the office.
The computer scientist is now said to be joining Google-owned DeepMind where he will reportedly onboard as an individual contributor.
TheNextWeb's author Tristan Greene recently addressed the matter saying that he believes that "losing Ian Goodfellow to DeepMind is the dumbest thing Apple’s ever done".
"There are a lot of machine learning developers in the world. But only one has been mentored by both Andrew Ng and Yoshua Bengio, invented a new kind of artificial neural network, contributed to or led research at Google Brain, OpenAI and Apple, and still has fewer than 40 candles to blow out on their birthday cake."
Greene thinks that letting such an exceptional mind go, over a disagreement with in-office work demands, is quite a stupid idea. Certainly, no one at Apple or any other company has to have special treatment, he admits. However, the contribution Ian Goodfellow made to the machine learning sphere can't be overestimated. Considering this, Greene states that "office hours are a pretty silly thing to lose any talented developer over".
Losing Goodfellow to Google, he notes, can be a huge mistake for two reasons. Firstly, it's hard to find another talent of such scale. Apart from that, his work at DeepMind can make the company the main competitor of Apple.
Goodfellow is the one who, together with Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio, invented the generative adversarial network (GAN).
"A GAN is a neural network that learns how to create content by trying to fool itself and, eventually, humans. Any time you hear about an AI that can generate text, write poetry, create images, or produce its own original music, you’re almost certainly hearing about a GAN."
Later Goodfellow served at Google Brain, where he worked on deep learning doing the basic research and improving the products. And after that he joined OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company that works with artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is basically the only company that is the direct competitor of Google's DeepMind.
"When Ian Goodfellow became the director of machine learning at Apple, many of us in tech journalism were surprised. It seemed like a huge loss for the Google Brain team, but it made sense for Goodfellow (it seemed like a well-deserved promotion) and, based on what we know about Apple’s AI programs, it didn’t seem like something that would come back to bite Google in the butt."
DeepMind, meanwhile, is working on the new AI GATO system, which Greene believes will be extremely marketable as it will be a really powerful AI assistant, "a version of Siri that could do a thousand different tasks on your behalf". While Siri can only perform simple things like doing browser searches, setting your alarm, or telling how many messages you have – which are basically the same task – GATO can become a real assistant that can help you in the everyday life.
"I’m talking about a version of Siri that could control a robot capable of washing your dishes, while simultaneously identifying high-weed areas in your front lawn, while also generating a completely original cartoon for your kids to watch based on your specific prompts, and so on and so forth."
Of course, there's no guarantee that DeepMind will actually compete with what Apple is currently working on. So, it remains to be seen what the field of AGI research will bring.
DeepMind's hire of Ian Goodfellow hasn't been officially announced yet, and the company declined to comment on the news. We also don't know for sure what the exact reasons behind the executive's departure were, and probably Tim Cook had good reasons for letting him leave Apple and join a rival team.
What do you think of Ian Goodfellow's departure? Will this change the picture of the AGI research field? Share your thoughts in the comments below and don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
