Eric Schmidt is the president of the board of directors of A, the new company that owns Google, and in a recent interview with the BBC he subtly attacked the service Apple Music of the Apple company.
More precisely, Eric Schmidt claims that Apple Music and its service for manually selecting the music that users should listen to is outdated, being extremely useful a decade ago, but technologically outdated at the moment.
Schmidt argues that it is much better to create an artificial intelligence system that learns user preferences and offers recommendations based on algorithms instead of giving people the chance to create playlists for users to listen to.
A decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music. Today, you're much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world – what actual listeners are most likely to like next – and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be …
The Apple company claims that the choice of playlists that are recommended to users is done partly by humans and partly by algorithms, so that in the end we have a combination between technology and intuition to offer users the best experience.
However, Schmidt's comments have to be seen a little ironically since in June Google launched its own radio station and also promoted the creation of lists by humans and not by an artificial intelligence system, so Schmidt probably hoped that his comments will not take this into account.
