CNBC:
Ian Goodfellow, one of the top minds in artificial intelligence at Google, has joined Apple in a director role.
The hire comes as Apple increasingly strives to tap AI to boost its software and hardware. Last year Apple hired John Giannandrea, head of AI and search at Google, to supervise AI strategy.
What does Ian bring to the table?
Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text.
GAN systems have been used to generate “deepfake” fake media content.
I’m assuming the “deepfake” reference here is a red herring. But it does make me wonder how this tech will fit in with Apple’s AI pursuits.
GANs are an exciting new subfield in neural networks. They can “fill in the blanks” and reduce the need for training data. Remember the trope about CSI detectives yelling “enhance” multiple times and a thumbnail image suddenly becomes ultra high resolution? Not so far fetched with GANs. https://github.com/david-gpu/srez
I imagine Apple has much more interesting plans, but if I had someone like this the first thing I’d put him on is fixing Siri’s voice… with basically an unlimited budget, because Apple’s text-to-speech is that important going forward.