Apple's AI director: Here's how to supercharge deep learning

Apple's director of artificial intelligence, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, believes that the deep neural networks that have produced spectacular results in recent years could be supercharged in coming years by the addition of memory, attention, and general knowledge. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Salakhutdinov said these attributes could help solve some of the outstanding problems in artificial intelligence. Salakhutdinov, who retains a post as an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, pointed in his talk to limitations with deep-learning-driven machine vision and natural-language understanding. Deep learning--a technique that involves using vast numbers of roughly simulated neurons arranged in many interconnected layers--has produced dramatic progress in machine perception over recent years, but there are many ways in which these networks are limited. Salakhutdinov showed, for example, how image captioning systems based on the technology can label images incorrectly because they tend to focus on everything in the image.