• Apple has been criticized for not doing enough in AI. Two recent announcements show the company is closing the gap.
• In the past two weeks, the company has announced the hiring of Google’s AI head, and an AI partnership with IBM.
• Google’s AI head (John Giannandrea) brings credibility to Apple AI, critical in recruiting, and is likely work on AI-powered interfaces and Apple’s self-driving car program.
• IBM partnership allows iOS developers access to IBM Watson’s enterprise machine learning, and use it to make smarter AI apps.

Core ML 101. At WWDC 2017 Apple unveiled Core ML, a platform that allows developers to integrate machine learning into an app. The AI model runs locally on iOS and does not need the cloud. At the time of the announcement, Apple outlined 15 domains for which they have created ML models, such as face detection, text summarization, and image captioning.

IBM Watson and Apple announcement. Two weeks ago Apple and IBM announced they will integrate IBM Watson with Apple Core ML. Previously, developers could convert AI models built on other third-party platforms, like TensorFlow (Google) or Azure ML (Microsoft) into Core ML, and then insert that model into an iOS app. Now developers will be able to use Watson to build the machine learning model, convert it to Core ML, and then feed the data back to Watson’s cloud. The reason why this is important is it allows iOS developers to leverage Watson’s capabilities and ultimately improve the AI in iOS apps.

Watson works locally on iOS and improves apps. What’s unique about Core ML is it runs locally on mobile devices, meaning it doesn’t have to send data back to a server. This is different than other mobile AI approaches. Running locally is an advantage when the speed of AI is important, like image recognition in AR or natural language processing. What’s new is Watson will be able to “teach” Core ML to run the AI model built with Watson. Basically, Watson does the hard work of getting a usable AI model built and then teaches it to Core ML, who can then run the model locally on its own. The app can then send data on the model’s performance back to Watson, at any time, to be analyzed for available improvements.

Recent history of Apple and IBM. In July 2014, Apple and IBM partnered to create enterprise applications on iOS devices, leveraging IBM’s big data and analytics and Apple’s hardware-software integration. IBM started selling iPhones and iPads to clients that came with software and applications for enterprise designed with Apple’s help.

Summary of big tech’s machine learning services. 

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