As with any company, the new hires sometimes reveal the path the company’s about to take.
In the case of Ian Goodfellow, a well-known expert in the machine-learning community, as well as Open AI, there might be some interesting things about to happen.
Goodfellow stands as a rare find, especially in that he invented a machine learning technique called a generative adversarial network (GAN) and wrote a deep learning textbook.
To understand what a GAN does, you have to know about supervised and unsupervised neural networks. First, when it comes to neural networks, there are supervised types and unsupervised types. Supervised neural nets are trained using labeled datasets. For example, a supervised neural net working with images are trained using correctly labeled images like cats, dogs, trees, etc.
Unsupervised neural nets learn on the fly. These don’t require large datasets but this also means unsupervised nets are a bit less accurate than supervised ones. A goal in machine learning is to improve the accuracy of unsupervised nets and be less reliant on supervised nets, because labeling and maintaining large datasets is time consuming and expensive.
A GAN functions as a means of improving unsupervised neural sets. These generative models. These can predict things by generating the most likely output based on a sequence of inputs. In a common example, a search engine can attempt to predict what you’re searching for as you type.
Neural nets based on the GAN architecture have been used in things like “deep fakes” which are fake “videos that can depict a person or persons saying things or performing actions that never occurred in reality.”
Mr. Goodfellow’s expertise is with image and video-based neural nets, and it’s thought that his work at Apple could focus on self-driving technology, Apple Photos, or the iPhone camera.
Other hires for the self-driving car group have included Tesla VPs like Michael Schwekutsch and Chris Porritt. In one interview, designer Marc Newson said he works on “special projects.” So the group has a wide range, and self-driving technology is just part of it (the Apple Watch also came out of this group).
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The Mac Observer and CNBC