Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#11

Post by quickmouse » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

olympus wrote: post #3

The link title is misleading. MS will not have 5k people working on AI. They merged their MS Research and their AI engineering team. It's not like they are going to drop all the other research they are doing to focus solely on AI. The new org is called the AI and Research Group. This is just a reorganization to democratize some of the resources available within MS.

with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company’s AI product efforts.

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#12

Post by eitally » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

quickmouse wrote: post #11

olympus wrote: post #3

The link title is misleading. MS will not have 5k people working on AI. They merged their MS Research and their AI engineering team. It's not like they are going to drop all the other research they are doing to focus solely on AI. The new org is called the AI and Research Group. This is just a reorganization to democratize some of the resources available within MS.

with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company’s AI product efforts.

Only if you stretch that definition beyond what most people are comfortable doing. The org includes the entire Bing team, for example. This would be like Google saying they have an x,xxx big AI team because they include the whole Search org, or the Apps org because they use ML in their products, too, and so do the Maps Mobile team, etc ad infinitum.

It's great that MS is merging these dispersed orgs, and the actual headline is fine, but calling it a "5,000 person AI division" is disingenuous at best.

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#13

Post by Houshalter » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

That's scary. The world is rushing full speed towards AGI. Yet few are working on or care about the hard problem of actually controlling AGI.

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#14

Post by meeper16 » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

They did that with Bing too, 5k people, and Bing wound up getting busted for stealing Google's search results: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#15

Post by learningbot » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

Microsoft is going in right direction. New CEO seems to know what he is doing.

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#16

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#17

Post by hood_syntax » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

0xFFC wrote: post #5

This seems good strategy. I am no expert, but AFAIK Microsoft research division is maybe (the) most advanced and most achieved research division in whole industry. Just look at people with H-Index more than 30 who works in Microsoft research.

I wouldn't be surprised, they are very happy to pay smart people to work part time on their favorite problems (Simon Peyton Jones for example)

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#18

Post by Dowwie » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

Which office location(s) are planned for this?

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#19

Post by faragon » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 3:28 PM UTC

So Microsoft finally will be able to implement Clippy properly :-)

Re: Microsoft creates 5000-person AI division

#20

Post by DanBC » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 3:31 PM UTC

faragon wrote: post #19

So Microsoft finally will be able to implement Clippy properly :-)

Clippy is pretty interesting because they had a good product, and then removed a bunch of features which turned it into a sucky awful product.

http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine