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FEB 24, 2017 @ 02:49 PM 75,142

What Companies Are Winning The Race For

Artificial Intelligence?

Quora, CONTRIBUTOR
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Who is leading in AI research among big players like IBM, Google, Facebook,
Apple and Microsoft? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share
knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the
world.

Answer by Eric Jang, Research Engineer at Google Brain, on Quora:

Firstly, my response contains some bias, because I work at Google Brain and I really
like it there. My opinions are my own, and I do not speak for the rest of my
colleagues or Alphabet as a whole.

I rank leaders in AI research among tech companies as follows:

1. Deepmind

I would say Deepmind is probably #1 right now, in terms of AI research.

Their publications are highly respected within the research community, and span a
myriad of topics such as Deep Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Neural Nets,
Robotics, transfer learning, and others. Being London-based, they recruit heavily
from Oxford and Cambridge, which are great ML feeder programs in Europe. They
hire an intellectually diverse team to focus on general AI research, including
traditional software engineers to build infrastructure and tooling, UX designers to
help make research tools, and even ecologists (Drew Purves) to research far-field
ideas like the relationship between ecology and intelligence.

They are second to none when it comes to PR and capturing the imagination of the
public at large, such as with DQN-Atari and the history-making AlphaGo. Whenever
a Deepmind paper drops, it shoots up to the top of Reddits Machine Learning page
and often Hacker News, which is a testament to how well-respected they are within
the tech community.

2. Google

Before you roll your eyes at me putting two Alphabet companies at the top of this
list, I discount this statement by also ranking Facebook and OpenAI on equal terms
at #2. Scroll down if you dont want to hear me gush about Google Brain :)

With all due respect to Yann LeCun (he has a pretty good answer), I think he is
mistaken about Google Brains prominence in the research community.

But much of it is focused on applications and product development rather than

long-term AI research.

This is categorically false, to the max.

TensorFlow (the Brain teams primary product) is just one of many Brain subteams,
and is to my knowledge the only one that builds an externally-facing product. When
Brain first started, the first research projects were indeed engineering-heavy, but
today, Brain has many employees that focus on long-term AI research in every AI
subfield imaginable, similar to FAIR and Deepmind.

FAIR has 16 accepted publications to the ICLR 2017 conference track

(announcement by Yann: Yann LeCun - FAIR has co-authors on 16 papers accepted
at...), with 3 selected for orals (i.e. very distinguished publications).

Google Brain actually slightly edged out FB this year at ICLR2017, with 20
accepted papers and 4 selected for orals. I'm excited that the Google Brain team
(g.co/brain) will have a decent presen...
This doesnt count publications from Deepmind or other teams doing research
within Google (Search, VR, Photos). Comparing the number of accepted papers is
hardly a good metric, but I want to dispel any insinuations by Yann that Brain is not
a legitimate place to do Deep Learning research.

Google Brain is also the industry research org with the most collaborative flexibility.
I dont think any other research institution in the world, industrial or otherwise, has
ongoing collaborations with Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, OpenAI, Deepmind, Google
X, and a myriad of product teams within Google.

I believe that Brain will soon be regarded as a top tier institution in the near future. I
had offers from both Brain and Deepmind, and chose the former because I felt that
Brain gave me more flexibility to design my own research projects, collaborate more
closely with internal Google teams, and join some really interesting robotics
initiatives that I cant disclose yet.

3. Facebook

FAIRs papers are good and my impression is that a big focus for them is language-
domain problems like question answering, dynamic memory, Turing-test-type stuff.
Occasionally there are some statistical-physics-meets-deep-learning papers.
Obviously they do computer vision type work as well. I wish I could say more, but I
dont know enough about FAIR besides their reputation is very good.

They almost lost the Deep Learning Framework wars with the widespread adoption
of TensorFlow, but well see if Pytorch is able to successfully capture back market
share.

One weakness of FAIR, in my opinion, is that its very difficult to have a research
role at FAIR without a PhD. A FAIR recruiter told me this last year. Indeed, PhDs
tend to be smarter, but I dont think having a PhD is necessary to bring fresh
perspectives and make great contributions to science.

4. OpenAI

OpenAI has an all-star list of employees: Ilya Sutskever (all-around Deep Learning
master), John Schulman (inventor of TRPO, master of policy gradients), Pieter
Abbeel (robot sent from the future to crank out a river of robotics research papers),
Andrej Karpathy (Char-RNN, CNNs), Durk Kingma (co-inventor of VAEs), Ian
Goodfellow (inventor of GANs), to name a few.

Despite being a small group of ~50 people (so I guess not a Big Player by
headcount or financial resources), they also have a top-notch engineering team and
publish top-notch, really thoughtful research tools like Gym and Universe. Theyre
adding a lot of value to the broader research community by providing software that
was once locked up inside big tech companies. This has added a lot of pressure on
other groups to start open-sourcing their codes and tools as well.
I almost ranked them as #1, on par with Deepmind in terms of top-research talent,
but they havent really been around long enough for me to confidently assert this.
They also havent pulled off an achievement comparable to AlphaGo yet, though I
cant overstate how important Gym / Universe are to the research community.

As a small non-profit research group building all their infrastructure from scratch,
they dont have nearly as much GPU resources, robots, or software infrastructure as
big tech companies. Having lots of compute makes a big difference in research
ability and even the ideas one is able to come up with.

Startups are hard and well see whether they are able to continue attracting top
talent in the coming years.

5. Baidu

Baidu SVAIL and Baidu Institute of Deep Learning are excellent places to do
research, and they are working on a lot of promising technologies like home
assistants, aids for the blind, and self-driving cars.

Baidu does have some reputation issues, such as recent scandals with violating
ImageNet competition rules, low-quality search results leading to a Chinese student
dying of cancer, and being stereotyped by Americans as a somewhat-sketchy
Chinese copycat tech company complicit in authoritarian censorship.

They are definitely the strongest player in AI in China though.

6. Microsoft Research

Before the Deep Learning revolution, Microsoft Research used to be the most
prestigious place to go. They hire very experienced faculty with many years of
experience, which might explain why they sort of missed out on Deep Learning (the
revolution in Deep Learning has largely been driven by PhD students).

Unfortunately, almost all deep learning research is done on Linux platforms these
days, and their CNTK deep learning framework havent gotten as attention as
TensorFlow, torch, Chainer, etc.

7. Apple

Apple is really struggling to hire deep learning talent, as researchers tend to want to
publish and do research, which goes against Apples culture as a product company.
This typically doesnt attract those who want to solve general AI or have their work
published and acknowledged by the research community. I think Apples design
roots have a lot of parallels to research, especially when it comes to audacious
creativity, but the constraints of shipping an insanely great product can be a
hindrance to long-term basic science.
8. IBM

I know a former IBM employee who worked on Watson and describes IBMs
cognitive computing efforts as a total disaster, driven from management that has
no idea what ML can or cannot do but sell the buzzword anyway. Watson uses Deep
Learning for image understanding, but as I understand it the rest of the information
retrieval system doesnt really leverage modern advances in Deep Learning.
Basically there is a huge secondary market for startups to capture applied ML
opportunities whenever IBM fumbles and drops the ball.

No offense to IBM researchers; youre far better scientists than I ever will be. My
gripe is that the corporate culture at IBM is not conducive to leading AI research.

Remark

To be honest, all the above companies (maybe with the exception of IBM) are great
places to do Deep Learning research, and given open source software + how prolific
the entire field is nowadays, I dont think any one tech firm leads AI research by a
substantial margin.

My advice for a prospective Deep Learning researcher is to find a team / project that
youre interested in, ignore what others say regarding reputation, and focus on doing
your best work so that your organization becomes regarded as a leader in AI
research :)

This question originally appeared on Quora. the place to gain and share
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