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People are finally waiting for news of Apple's AI, but it is the news that a machine learning guru left to join a non-profit research organization.

Ali Farhadi, one of Apple's machine learning leaders, left Apple to return to the Allen Institute of artificial Intelligence (AI2).

There are few details about his work at Apple, but according to previous sources, he led Apple's next Generation Machine Learning work (next-generation Machine Learning efforts), including Siri, Core ML, Neural Engine and other projects.

This time, he will succeed "Oren Etzioni" as CEO of the Allen Institute, mainly responsible for consolidating and promoting AI2's position and giving full play to its unique role as an independent non-profit organization.

Machine learning plays a vital role in many of Apple's products, from the health features of the Apple Watch to the intelligence of the device.

Apple just showed off at WWDC at the beginning of the month, and machine learning Daniel left at the end of the month, which makes people feel sad.

But in fact, the departure of Farhadi is not a precedent, Apple's brain drain has already begun.

Fierce battle for AI, Apple brain drain Apple, a company known for its stable leadership, is facing unprecedented personnel upheaval.

Apple has lost at least 11 senior executives since the second half of 2022 to April this year.

Most of them have the title of "vice president", just below the senior vice president level reported to CEO Tim Cook, including Evans Hankey, a former head of industrial design.

The former, once hailed as the successor to Apple's legendary designer Jony Ive, has been vacant since he left.

According to internal sources, this wave of executive departures has had a big impact on iPhone, iOS, iCloud, and even Apple's supply chain management.

In addition to the exodus of senior executives, the dark cloud of technology brain drain has been hanging over Apple. The Information revealed in December last year that Apple's chip design department had lost a lot of talent, and these engineers were mainly responsible for the design and development of A-series chips.

△ image source: The Information

In this wave of AI, talent competition has always been a thickened keyword.

The former head of industrial design, Hankey, who had previously left office, chose to leave because of a lack of authority, such as the right to overturn engineering decisions made by other departments.

In May this year, the media reported that three Apple AI engineers had switched to Google, alerting Google CEO firewood chopper and Apple CEO Cook.

When the three Daniel mentioned the reasons for leaving, one of them was "internal organizational chaos" and revealed that Siri was in decline because of team internal friction and technical judgment.

These employees' messages all seem to point to one problem:

Apple's internal system is bureaucratic and has serious internal friction.

In addition, behind Apple's brain drain is also the bottleneck of its own performance growth. Although AR glasses were presented at Apple's developer conference in early June, the share price plummeted.

A large portion of executive compensation comes from stocks, such as Cook's compensation of about $49 million this year, including a base salary of $3 million, a cash bonus of $6 million and a stock bonus worth about $40 million.

In other words, more than 80% of Cook's 2023 income will come from stocks, most of which is linked to the company's performance.

The Farhadi left, issuing a statement "because the world needs truly open and transparent artificial intelligence research". But it is speculated that the reason for the departure may also have something to do with a series of chaos at Apple.

Coming from Allen, returning to Allen and returning to Farhadi itself, it is not surprising that he left to join the Allen Institute of artificial Intelligence.

Because he already has a deep AI2 imprint on him. He joined the Allen Institute of artificial Intelligence as early as 2014 and set up a computer vision team that focuses on visual common sense reasoning and the role of action and interaction in visual understanding.

During this period, Farhadi also co-founded Xnor.ai, which focuses on in-depth learning of mechanical equipment.

Xnor.ai is from the Allen Institute of artificial Intelligence incubator project AI2 Incubator, which is one of the project's biggest commercial successes to date. Later, the company was acquired by Apple for 200 million, and Farhadi joined Apple.

Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, revealed that AI2 spent nearly a year looking for the next CEO, and he was involved in the search along with AI2's board members. They narrowed down from more than 50 candidates to six finalists, and finally chose Ali Farhadi.

On the entry of Farhadi, the Allen Institute of artificial Intelligence said: "Farhadi is a leader of executives, entrepreneurs, academics and researchers, whose rich scientific research experience will provide important help for product solutions."

One More ThingLLM scuffle, AI2 also began to enter the game.

At present, an open generation language model project called OLMo has been set up to create an open language model for scientists.

The plan will benefit the research community and the public by providing access to and education on all aspects of the model, including its development, implementation and use.

Unlike large companies anxious to make money from big models, OLMo will be the first language model designed specifically for scientific understanding and discovery, and the model is expected to be unveiled in early 2024, according to project director of OLMo and senior director of NLP research at OLMo.

Reference link:

Https://www.geekwire.com/2023/apple-machine-learning-leader-ali-farhadi-named-ceo-of-allen-institute-for-artificial-intelligence

This article is from the official account of Wechat: qubit (ID:QbitAI), by Sean.

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