How Apple uses machine learning

In case you missed it, there’s a post on Medium by Steven Levy that explains everything you might want to know about how machine learning works at Apple.

It’s a fascinating account of the Apple Brain, the A.I. hidden inside your iPhone. To be honest, I’ve always wondered about this stuff: According to Levy’s article, the “brain” is about 200MB, depending on your personal data stores, and it tracks interactions with people and acts a bit like a neural network. And yes, when Apple buys a company, it is usually doing that to hire the people.

Is this the new Apple, a company that allows people to get an inside view of what they are doing? Not really. The piece is interesting, but also a little short on actual details about what Apple is doing and why. What makes it a must-read is the fact that we have so little information at all about the Cupertino tech giant.

And we at least get some juicy information, like this line about how the Apple Pencil works with the iPad Pro: “Using a machine learning model for ‘palm rejection’ enabled the screen sensor to detect the difference between a swipe, a touch, and a pencil input with a very high degree of accuracy.”

You can read the full post here.