Ian Goodfellow, director of machine learning at Apple, has reportedly decided to leave the firm. The Verge‘s Zoë Schiffer reports that his decision would be motivated by the giant’s back-to-work policy.

Apple employees demonstrated during the COVID-19 health crisis that productivity and efficiency could both be achieved even when remote. So it was no surprise that employees asked to work from home after Apple announced the return to the office last September.

During the health crisis, Apple employees, worked remotely. They learned new habits and were able to work efficiently. With the gradual return to face-to-face, employees returned to their offices in September 2021. However, this new policy of ending telecommuting was not well received internally.

This plan to return to the office was pushed back to December 2021 due to the COVID-19 surge and was finally adopted as a hybrid last month, offering the option to also work remotely under certain conditions. Other large companies that have adopted a hybrid work policy include Meta and Airbnb. The social networking giant allows half of its employees to work remotely while Airbnb now lets its employees work from anywhere in the world. Within Apple, the demand for more flexible work policies continues to grow.

Ian Goodfellow, a leading figure in machine learning, has been at Apple for over 3 years, after leaving Google to join the Apple firm in April 2019. He is known as the inventor of generative adversarial networks, he was also Apple’s most quoted ML expert. Opposed to the current work policy, he wrote to the staff, ” I strongly believe that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team.

He would thus have taken the decision to leave his position. A departure that would be a blow to Apple, especially considering how machine learning has become an integral part of the company’s products, including Siri, Face ID and of course the M1 and M1 Ultra chips, presented a few months ago, which have a CPU with 16 cores and 20 cores for machine learning.

Translated from Apple : Ian Goodfellow, directeur du machine learning, aurait démissionné