Apple, ACLU join partnership to research artificial intelligence, create best practices

When industry leaders launched a non-profit organization in September to create best practices for artificial intelligence, one company was notably missing. On Friday, the Partnership on AI announced that Apple had joined as a founding member. The organization, which will publish research on the ethics, transparency and reliability of AI, among other things, was initially made up of tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and IBM. Though Apple collaborated with the partnership since before it was announced last year, it wasn't officially a member until now. Tom Gruber, Apple's head of advance development of Siri, will represent the company. "We're glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Gruber said.