Apple is making a new push into artificial intelligence, giving developers access to the company’s neural network technology in a move that should mean big things for apps you’ll use in the future.
While opening up Siri to third-party developers was the most attention-grabbing news coming out of yesterday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple has also revealed that it is will allow developers to tap into the company’s artificial neural network technology. And once the dust is settled, this could turn out to be the biggest development of WWDC, bar none!
Whether it’s machines that can recognize photos, understand speech or drive a car, neural nets are almost certainly behind any breakthroughs you’ve read about recently.
As Apple explains in accompanying notes about its new neural network API:
“The Accelerate framework’s new basic neural network subroutines (BNNS) is a collection of functions that you can use to construct neural networks. It is supported on OS X, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, and is optimized for all CPUs supported on those platforms.
BNNS supports implementation and operation of neural networks for inference, using input data previously derived from training. BNNS does not do training, however. Its purpose is to provide very high performance inference on already trained neural networks.”
By most accounts, Apple is well behind rivals like Facebook and Google when it comes to AI research. While that’s not going to change overnight, opening up some of its tools to developers is certainly a positive move. And, hey, if it means that we all get smarter apps in the meantime, all the better!
Now we just have to wait and see what developers will do with it …
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
3 responses to “Apple gives devs the chance to harness power of neural networks”
Man! I don’t think people understand how big this is. Apple just opened up Siri, it’s Nural nets, and is now collecting more data, in a safer way. Now… We really have to understand what just happened here. Apple has the absolute most Developer Devotion in the whole tech industry. The power Siri, and Apples Nural Nets will gain will be unreal. Look…. any time Apple releases new features, huge numbers of developers implement those features within seconds of there release. Even the big name, popular apps like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, all immediately implement any new features Apple presents. This is something that both Google, & Microsoft has struggled with for a long time, and would kill to have… Literally. Developer Devotion at this scale. Even now Amazon Eco has a little more than 1000 apps working with hay Alexa. Now, you just wait and see the staggering # of apps that end up working with “Hay Siri”, even the big name ones. Mark my words. It’s going to be unreal.
I’m tempted to think Apple’s not really behind Facebook and Google in terms of AI research because of how much they’ve baked in that differential privacy or whatever they called it. AI and learning while maintaining privacy must’ve been a very complex thing to implement, right?
The document quoted from Apple has a typo in that it refers to macOS by the now obsolete name of “OS X”. However, I’m too lazy to tell Apple about it.