Recently, Ian Goodfellow, Apple's director of machine learning, confirmed his impending departure in an email to employees. After three years at Apple, he left partly because of a policy of returning to office work.
While the official reason for his departure is unclear, Gudferro acknowledges that "Apple's policy adjustments to get more people to work in the office are important factors." According to Zoe Schiffer, a reporter for The Verge, Gudefello wrote in an email: "I firmly believe that for my team, more flexibility is the best policy." ”
Figure | Screenshot of Twitter by The Verge reporter Zoe Schiffer (Source: Twitter)
Under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more enterprises are adopting flexible office forms and providing remote work options. According to a Upwork survey of 1,500 hiring managers in the U.S., 61.9% of companies plan to work remotely as a primary form of office today and in the coming years, a trend that accelerates the growth of remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The same report predicts that by 2025, 22 percent of the U.S. workforce (36.2 million people) will work remotely. This is an 87% increase from pre-COVID-19 levels.
Silicon Valley tech companies have long faced fierce competition for positions such as software engineers, and whether companies can work remotely can even affect the absorption of company talent. According to CNBC, Amazon, Pinterest, Intel, and PayPal all acknowledge that they may be at risk of brain drain against competitors who offer more attractive job benefits, such as remote or hybrid work.
Due to a combination of factors such as the confidentiality of Apple products, patented technology and the company's privacy, Apple has not given up on plans for employees to return to the office. Starting April 11, Apple officially arranged for employees to return to Apple Park according to the requirements of office work, ending a two-year period of home work. And on May 23, a policy of working in the office three days a week was enacted.
Some employees have long been unhappy with Apple's decision to return to the office, and as early as the summer of 2021, in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, many employees said: "Without the inclusiveness that flexibility brings, many of us believe that we must choose between family, happiness and empowerment." ”
Ian Goodfellow (Source: Wikipedia)
And the departure of Goodefellow can be said to be a big impact on Apple. Goodefero, an expert in machine learning, proposed generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs, the generator and discriminator, are competing against each other to provide checks and balances to help improve accuracy and reliability, a hot trend in machine learning in recent years.
According to the professional social networking site LinkedIn, Goodfellow joined Apple in March 2019 as the director of machine learning for a special project group, and he may be Apple's most cited machine learning expert at present. As can be seen from the addition of Goodefello, Apple attaches more importance to the development of existing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
Prior to Goodefello, Apple hired John Giannandrea as senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy in 2018, after eight years at Google and as head of artificial intelligence and search, managing artificial intelligence strategy.
It is worth noting that in recent years, technology companies have invested in machine learning and competition has become increasingly fierce.
Machine learning, in which computers are able to achieve autonomous learning without explicit programming. It gives computers the ability to more resemble human self-learning, giving AI the opportunity to create its own set of neural networks. Simply put, this means that it can provide AI models with replicas that create human brains, helping machines better understand data and make data-driven decisions by generating algorithms, which is also at the heart of AI. For example, software testing is a classic example of machine learning for many organizations, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and other organizations.
According to the "China Machine Learning Industry Market Research" report, "in the machine learning market, the basic layer core chips are mainly mastered by overseas traditional chip manufacturers such as Nvidia, Intel, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc., while big data service providers show the characteristics of large quantity and scattered distribution, and the market competition is large." ”
Mainstream products in the machine learning technology open platform include Amazon Machine Learning of Amazon, Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Workbench, Tencent's DI-X Machine Learning Platform, Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning PAI, etc. Typical representative manufacturers of the domestic application layer include SenseTime, Yitu Technology, Yuncong Technology, Fourth Paradigm, Cambrian, etc.
In recent years, China has also attached great importance to the study of machine learning. From a macro level, according to the 2021 "Chinese Industry Industry Market Prospect and Investment Strategic Planning Analysis Report", it is expected that the market size of China's machine learning core products will reach 50.65 billion yuan in 2025, and the market size of machine learning-related industries will also grow to 323.38 billion yuan.
With the continuous development of digital technology, there is still a huge space for the future of artificial intelligence machine learning to be explored. As the digital transformation of enterprises and the number of commercial products built on these architectures increases, the demand for engineers and researchers in the field will also increase, and the retention and competition for talent by technology companies will become more intense.
-End-
Reference:
https://www.apollotechnical.com/statistics-on-remote-workers/?msclkid=ef37e4f5d02c11ec8237b87ff2e82a92
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/tech-companies-acknowledge-rejecting-remote-work-could-cost-them-talent.html#:~:text=Amazon%2C%20Pinterest%2C%20Intel%20and%20PayPal%20all%20acknowledged%20they,robust%20competition%20for%20in-demand%20roles%20like%20software%20engineers.?msclkid=7a6c5c5dd02d11ec9ba34954273e7aa8
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/06/05/apple-employees-wrote-a-letter-to-ceo-tim-cook-saying-why-they-dont-want-to-return-to-the-office/?msclkid=86989039d02e11ecadf52d85d23f2c88&sh=7642ced86418