13 July, 2018
Apple formally announced ex-Google executive John Giannandrea as its Chief of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy.
Before joining Apple, Giannandrea spent about eight years at Google where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams.
This news of him joining Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence team broke out yesterday.
Giannandrea has specialised in technology that involves processing speech and text and providing useful information to users.
Figuratively, Apple lags behind from Google and Amazon in AI areas like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision. NLU is all about teaching computers to understand language like humans.
Giannandrea has said that he finds NLU to be the most exciting part of AI. In an interview he even referred to natural language understanding as the “holy grail for applied artificial intelligence.”
If we relate it with Siri, it is just an answering machine. It requires the computer to understand what you want and how to get you what you need.
With Giannandrea now, Apple’s efforts to upgrade their AI and NLU will pay off fruitfully.
(Image credits:- mactrast.com)