[throwaway287391]

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern.

I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fast-paced and low-overhead, academic papers by small teams of individual researchers have in no way reflected the opinions of e.g. the executives of a large company. I would not be particularly surprised to see another team of Apple researchers publishing a paper in the coming weeks with the opposite take, for example.

[jmsdnns]

The author is an intern, but they're also almost done with their PhD. They're not just any intern.

[throwaway287391]

That's kind of expected for a research intern -- internships are most commonly done within 1-2 years before graduation. But in any case, the fact that the first author is an intern is just the cherry on top for me -- my comment would be the same modulo the "especially" remark if all the authors were full time research staff.