GAN's father, Ian Goodfellow, leaves Apple: Doesn't want to go back to office work

Reports from the Heart of the Machine

Machine Heart Editorial Department

For Apple, Ian Goodfellow's departure cost the company quite a lot.

According to The Verge, Apple's machine learning director Ian Goodfellow resigned three years after joining the company, in part because of Apple's policy on returning to office work. In an email to employees, Goodfellow confirmed the imminent departure.

Ian Goodfellow

While the official reasons for leaving are unclear, Goodfellow did acknowledge in an email that Apple's policy of returning employees to the office was part of the reason for his resignation.

After working remotely for more than two years, Apple asked its employees to return to the office from April 11, initially, employees only had to work one day a week in the office, the rest of the time remotely. After that, the time spent working in the office gradually increases over time. Employees will be in the office at least two days a week by May 2 and back to the office at least three days a week after May 23.

But the request to return to the office has caused resentment among Goodfellow, who said, "I firmly believe that greater flexibility is the best strategy for my team."

Of course, in addition to Goodfellow, there are other Apple employees who oppose the plan to return to the office. A survey of a small number of employees found that many Apple employees are looking for new job opportunities, including their return to the office policy, the possibility of contracting the coronavirus, dissatisfaction with corporate culture and the inability to achieve work-life balance.

Not long ago, in a letter to Apple CEO Tim In a letter from Cook, a group of employees said: "Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, we believe we must choose between life and work." We may continue to be part of Apple and may leave. This is a decision that none of us will easily make, and it is a decision that many people do not want to make.

According to Goodfellow's profile on the LinkedIn, he joined Apple in March 2019 as director of machine learning for the special project team. However, his profile has not been updated with the departure. Previously, Goodfellow worked as a senior researcher at Google.

LinkedIn Address: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-goodfellow-b7187213/

About Ian GoodFellow

Ian Goodfellow is one of the most high-profile young scholars in the field of machine learning, studying machine learning at Stanford University with his bachelor's and master's degrees under Ng Enda, and studying machine learning with Yoshua Bengio, a renowned scholar at the University of Montreal.

His most notable achievement was the proposed Generative Adversarial Network (GANs) in June 2014. This technology has become the hottest topic of discussion in the machine learning community in recent years, and GAN-related papers have been emerging. GANs have become the research direction of many scholars.

GANs contain two types of neural networks: generators that create new data instances and discriminators that distinguish between generators creating fake data from real data. The two neural networks challenge each other with increasingly realistic fake data, optimizing their strategies until the generated data is indistinguishable from the real data.

For some time in the past, GANs made major breakthroughs in image generation, now producing highly realistic composite images of animals, landscapes, and human faces. For example, a website that can synthesize faces: thispersondoesnotexist.com.

But the success of GANs has also opened Pandora's box, raising ethical questions and potential dangers. For example, some people use GAN to develop deepfake face exchange technology to produce face-changing star, and some people worry that GAN is used to generate fake news to manipulate public opinion.

Ian GoodFellow citations are soaring year on year, source: Google Scholar

So far, Ian's paper has been cited more than 180,000 times, and GAN's paper has more than 40,000 citations.

Chart: The highest cited works (the second is a book)

In 2016, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and others launched the famous fundamentals of artificial intelligence, Deep Learning, which has been listed as a must-read in the field of machine learning.

Link to deep learning Chinese edition: https://github.com/exacity/deeplearningbook-chinese

Heart of the Machine Ian GoodFellow & Yoshua Bengio Co-Signed Deep Learning

However, after joining Apple, it may be required by the company, Ian Goodfellow released papers and participated in academic exchange activities are not particularly many, it can be said that it has been silent for a considerable period of time.

Ian Goodfellow left Apple and wondered where his next stop would be.

Reference Links:

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/07/apple-director-of-machine-learning-resigns/

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/05/07/apples-director-of-machine-learning-exits-over-return-to-office-policy