Inside the secret meeting where Apple revealed the state of its AI research

Apple has long been secretive about the research done within its Cupertino, California, labs. It's easy to understand why. Conjecture can spin out of even the most benign of research papers or submissions to medical journals, especially when they're tied to the most valuable company on the planet. But it seems Apple is starting to open up about its work, at least in artificial intelligence. On Dec. 6, at an invitation-only lunch at an industry AI conference, the company's new head of machine learning, Russ Salakhutdinov, and other Apple employees gave a wide-ranging talk detailing the problems the company is using AI to tackle, according to nine slides from the presentation obtained by Quartz. Apple, unsurprisingly, is working on a lot of the same problems as other companies that are exploring machine learning: recognizing and processing images, predicting user behavior and events in the physical world, modeling language for use in personal assistants, and trying to understand how to deal with uncertainty when an algorithm can't make a high-confidence decision.