Apple’s notoriously tight secrecy about its activities is set to change as it tries to retain and hire talent, at least in one area, according to an Apple Inc. executive.

The company is going to start publishing some of their artificial intelligence work and engaging more with the wider academic community, Russ Salakhutdinov, Apple’s director of AI research, announced at the widely attended Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona Monday.

According to Salakhutdinov, the goal of opening up Apple’s AI research is to help the company attract and retain top talent in AI, which traditionally has been marked by open collaboration. Top researchers routinely attend industry conferences, publish papers and contribute to open-source projects.

Conversely, Apple has kept its employee’s findings locked down, seeing any developments as valuable intellectual property that should never be shared — until now.

“When you’re a researcher, you assume that you’re going to publish your work,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s AI director, told Business Insider. “It’s very important for a scientist because the currency of the career as a scientist is the intellectual impact. So you can’t tell people ‘come work for us but you can’t tell people what you’re doing’ because you basically ruin their career. That’s a big element.”

Facebook has notably open-sourced a number of its AI-related projects, including a toolkit called Torchnet that provides building blocks for deep learning projects, and fastTEXT, an AI bot-building library, a part of the Facebook AI Research Lab’s goal to help engineers and researchers by making its work available to the masses.

Salakhutdinov just joined Apple in October, poached from Carnegie Mellon University, so the announcement that Apple is breaking from a Steve Jobs-era tradition of not publishing its work could well be regarded as being a changing of the guard.

That said, it would be unrealistic to believe that Apple will publish all of its AI research. But as Wired points out, “That’s the irony of the AI revolution: If Apple wants to stay ahead of its competition, it has to finally start giving away its secrets.”

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