Is Apple aiming to deliver the singularity?

They might not quite be aiming that high in 2015, but the tech giant is currently beefing up its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning staff, according to a report Monday.

Reuters claims that Apple is currently attempting to hire 86 people in the AI field, in particular targeting PhD programs for potential employees, competing with Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in what is described by academics to be “a fierce contest” for talent.

Machine learning, the concept that in part drives Apple’s voice assistant Siri and services such as Google Now, relies on crunching large amounts of data to provide unprompted services such as reminders of when to leave for an appointment based on traffic.

Although not specifically spelled out, hiring in the field would be related to Apple looking to boost the capabilities built into iOS in particular to deliver an improved product at a time Google’s Google Now just keeps on getting better.

“They want to make a phone that responds to you very quickly without knowledge of the rest of the world,” Co-founder of machine learning startup Dato Joseph Gonzalez told Reuters. “It’s harder to do that.”

Push to singularity

While it’s easy to make the singularity jokes whenever artificial intelligence is raised, we may actually not be that far off now. What we are seeing between Apple, Google, and even Microsoft with its Cortana platform are rapid leaps forward in machine learning delivery, or as investor Gary Morgenthaler told Reuters, “What seemed like science fiction only four years ago has become an expectation.”

Moore’s Law applies more to computing power, but the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are starting to demonstrate a similar advancement curve; if we couldn’t envisage as little as four years ago services such as Google Now, what sort of services will we be seeing in 2020, or even 2030.

As Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity is Near:

“Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view.”

Apple won’t be the company that takes us there (you’d bet money on it being Google), but it’s an important player in the competitive field that is pushing forward the space by turning what was once science fiction into science fact.

 Image credit: matsuyuki/Flickr/CC by 2.0