Where did the money made by Apple go? It is replicating another "iPhone" in the artificial intelligence community.

Preface · The new wave of technology is coming

The slowdown in smartphone sales is a well-known story, and the “app economy” derived from it is also slowing down. Since last year, Silicon Valley unicorns have faced dilemmas such as shrinking valuations, streamlining their business, and leaving employees. The market is full of sorrow. Forbes will call this year the "year of the unicorn fall."

The same story was staged in the Chinese Internet market. In 2015, the smartphone representative Xiaomi mobile phone reportedly failed to achieve the expected sales volume, and many life service companies merged. Nowadays, smartphone-based ideas in the market are almost exhausted. With a little creativity, it will attract a large number of companies to follow up – for example, there are more than 100 product follow-ups in popular video broadcasts.

Artificial intelligence is considered to be the next wave of technology. It can improve the existing technology ecosystem and solve some new problems. For example, when users drive, they can query real-time road conditions and driving routes with precise voice technology. Based on this, artificial intelligence will also touch the areas where smartphones have not been transformed, such as industrial, medical, automotive, and agricultural.

Common large technology companies are planning the artificial intelligence market. Microsoft launched the voice assistant Cortana, covering all Windows devices; Amazon launched the smart speaker Echo, targeting the home market; the deepest accumulation of Google (microblogging) in the field of driverless, image recognition, speech processing, machine learning has achieved coverage.

What is Apple doing?

I. Apple's artificial intelligence layout

Apple launched smart voice assistants earlier than its rivals. The iPhone 4s released in 2011 built the smart voice service Siri acquired a year ago. Unfortunately, Apple has not been able to establish a leading edge with Siri, and the hardware-first culture has limited the development of Siri. Five years after the acquisition, Siri's initial team almost completely left Apple. After the two founders left, they founded Viv, another smart voice company, which claims to be smarter than Siri.

But it is not possible to attribute Siri's defeat to Apple. A few years ago, artificial intelligence has not yet erupted, and smartphones and tablets have continued to grow at an alarming rate. Apple's focus on R&D resources in hardware is understandable.

(In the third quarter of this year, iPhone sales fell 15% year-on-year, and revenue fell 23% year-on-year.)

Now it is different, the market has changed, even Apple has to adjust its business according to the market environment. Since the second half of last year, Apple has begun to emphasize service revenue generation, and investment in artificial intelligence has also increased:

- In October 2015, the acquisition of British artificial intelligence company Vocal IQ, Vocal IQ's expertise in natural language processing and machine-autonomous learning;

- In October 2015, the acquisition of artificial intelligence company PercepTIo. PercepTIo specializes in smartphone image recognition, and its deep learning technology allows mobile phones to recognize images without relying on external databases. Counting the previous Vocal IQ, Apple acquired two artificial intelligence companies in just 5 days;

- In January 2016, the acquisition of artificial intelligence company EmoTIent. EmoTIent's technology analyzes the facial expressions of people in the image and discerns their emotions;

- In August 2016, 200 million US dollars to acquire artificial intelligence company Turi. Founded by a professor at the University of Washington, Turi provides developers with artificial intelligence development tools and frameworks. Turi provides a variety of development and management services such as building a recommendation engine, identifying fraud, analyzing user habits, and locating potential users.

The acquired technology was quickly digested and integrated into the apple ecosystem. At the WWDC Developers Conference in June this year, Apple's three major systems -- iOS, watchOS, macOS -- were updated, and several important upgrades were related to artificial intelligence:

- The system album can identify people and things in the photo, search for corresponding photos based on people and things, and the system can automatically classify according to different themes of the photos;

- Siri login to macOS desktop system, open API interface, Apple's intelligent voice service is open to more services and users;

- Improve the display level of the iOS search function. iOS 10, global search can be used in the lock screen interface and drop-down notifications, so Apple will get more opportunities to process text search and understand semantic commands;

Apple also demonstrated the use of Siri to start WeChat, convert the voice into text and send it to the designated contacts. Supporting these operations is artificial intelligence technology such as speech recognition, semantic analysis, and answer generation. From the perspective of display effects, Apple's artificial intelligence technology can already achieve some quite practical functions.

(WWDC, Apple Shows Sending WeChat with Siri)

Second, differential privacy allows Apple to achieve user privacy and improve service balance

One obstacle to the development of Apple's artificial intelligence technology is the lack of rich and detailed user data. Facebook and Google focus on improving services by collecting user data, but Apple has been cautious about user data because of its emphasis on privacy. After the FBI asked Apple to unlock the iPhone in March this year, Apple’s attitude was more conservative.

This somewhat limits the development of Apple's artificial intelligence. Without careful user behavior data, it is difficult to make targeted improvements. A well-known Silicon Valley reporter Dr. Mo commented, “If a company knows you well, you should worry that it may invade privacy; but if a company knows little about you, then you have reason to doubt its ability to build high-efficiency artificial intelligence. ""

Fortunately, Apple quickly found the answer, and it announced that it would predict user behavior and needs through "Differential Privacy." The system first randomizes the individual user data, then sends the data to Apple as a whole, and finally draws large-scale trends through batch analysis of the data. Differential privacy does not require precise monitoring of individuals, so don't worry about breaking user privacy.

(Differential privacy is only used in iOS 10 input methods, search, and notes for the time being)

In iOS 10, through differential privacy, the input method can find group language trends and give predictions in association vocabulary. It also sorts Emoji expressions, prioritizing common expressions and avoiding iterative searches.

The mobile phone ecosystem is built around the APP, and the isolated APP splits the information and the search engine is difficult to retrieve. Apple introduced the "deep link" in iOS 9 to solve the problem of APP isolation, which can search for information about the docking APP. In iOS 10, Apple further optimized its search capabilities through differential privacy. Based on the trends reflected by the overall user search, the system can find the most popular deep links, assign higher rankings, and users get more accurate information.

Conclusion · The data center under construction, Apple will open the gap with its rivals

The development of artificial intelligence depends on the improvement of computing power and data volume. Differential privacy solves the contradiction of collecting user privacy improvement services. Data is no longer a factor limiting Apple's artificial intelligence development.

But Apple needs to improve its cloud computing capabilities, and it doesn't have an advantage in cloud services. The market is currently dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google, and the four companies have a market share of 54%.

(Gartner released 2016Q2 cloud basic services market statistics, the market is mainly Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google control)

Apple’s annual spending on data services for cloud services is said to be about $1 billion, and it is working to reduce cloud service spending. In March of this year, Apple abandoned Amazon AWS, which was previously used, and switched to the cheaper Google GCP. In order to avoid relying on a company, Apple also uses Microsoft Azure cloud services.

In addition, Apple is still building its own data center. In March of this year, Apple's data center plan "Project McQueen" was exposed; five months later, Apple was reported to invest $1 billion to establish a data center and R&D center in Vietnam, and it will purchase land construction data in Hong Kong and China in the future. center.

Self-built data centers are cheaper than third-party services, and they also avoid core data leaks. In the long run, it will promote the company's cloud computing capabilities, which is essential for improving artificial intelligence technology.

Cook recently described his vision of artificial intelligence in an interview with The Washington Post, saying that Apple has been making progress. If data accumulation and data center construction are going well enough, Apple's artificial intelligence is promising to open up its rivals faster than the iPhone 9 years ago.

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