Apple hired Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon University in October. The ban on publication has hindered the company's ability to hire the best talent because researchers are often less willing to work in a secretive environment where they can't engage openly with others. To compensate for the hiring difficulties, Apple has bought a series of AI startups, spending $200 million on Seattle-based Turi Inc. earlier this year to add to half a dozen other acquisitions.

Apple, the most the secretive member of the technology industry, is starting to break down its walls. Russ Salakhutdinov, the company's director of artificial intelligence research, says Apple will start letting its AI researchers publish papers and engage with the greater AI community, according to a report from Business Insider. Salakhutdinov reportedly made the announcement earlier today at the NIPS conference in Barcelona, Spain. The goal, according to Salakhutdinov, is to help attract and retain top talent in the industry. Unlike some areas in tech Apple can afford to keep behind closed doors, AI thrives on open collaboration. Many of the top AI researchers routinely attend industry conferences, publish papers, and contribute to open-source projects with mission statements geared toward the safe and careful development of machine intelligence.

Apple Inc. will allow its artificial intelligence teams to publish research papers for the first time, marking a significant change in strategy that could help accelerate the iPhone maker's advances in deep learning. When Apple introduced its Siri virtual assistant in 2011, the company appeared to have a head start over many of its nearest competitors. But it has lost ground since then to the likes of Alphabet Inc.'s Google Assistant and Amazon.com Researchers say among the reasons Apple has failed to keep pace is its unwillingness to allow its AI engineers to publish scientific papers, stymieing its ability to feed off wider advances in the field. So you can sleep an extra five minutes.