Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
geekwire.com
Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#2Maybe it'll make windows better.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#3We seem to be at an inflection point with AI -- companies across the board are investing billions of dollars into AI R&D and I expect that we'll start to see some really amazing products and services coming out of this in the coming decades.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#4We seem to be at an inflection point with AI -- companies across the board are investing billions of dollars into AI R&D and I expect that we'll start to see some really amazing products and services coming out of this in the coming decades.
It's either that, or a great disillusionment in ~5 years when the investments don't pan out, followed by the next AI winter.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#5Which office location(s) are planned for this?
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#6We seem to be at an inflection point with AI -- companies across the board are investing billions of dollars into AI R&D and I expect that we'll start to see some really amazing products and services coming out of this in the coming decades.
It's either that, or a great disillusionment in ~5 years when the investments don't pan out, followed by the next AI winter.
The next AI winter will come when we maxed out on the current technology, i.e. when model training will become too expensive. If all that is left to do is to run training on top of all of Youtube videos, one might have to wait for 10 years until that becomes feasible.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#7Prepare for Clippy 2.0!
(Joke; Microsoft Research are actually highly respected, it's just that like Xerox they have some trouble turning it into products)
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#8To put this in perspective, 5000 people at $200k per year (which is conservative if you include benefits, etc.) is 1 billion dollars in comp per year.
So OpenAI is spending a billion dollars over the next several years.
Microsoft is spending a billion dollars per year.
Google, etc. do the math.
There's literally billions of dollars now being spent on moving deep learning forward. Pretty amazing when I think back to 2011 and there were machine learning conferences where literally no one I spoke to had heard of deep learning.
People worrying about a second AI winter are like the people that have been worrying about an "internet bubble" since 2004. It's fine to be worried, there will be bubbles, but this time it's different and there are many reasons for that. There is no "internet industry" anymore; it's become more segmented and just plain bigger. Similarly, there will be no "AI industry"; it will branch out, and there are more potential applications of "understanding data and automating decisions" than there were in the 80s.
> something that they are branding AI - I might wait and see how much of it is on real AI - what ever that is.
Yeah, I wouldn't get hung up on that, they're calling it AI because that's easier to explain to reporters than deep learning. The difference is deep learning techniques are already being used in released products and companies are looking to do more of that, so there is a very real definition and set of goals associated with what these groups are doing, it's not just, "hey everyone, let's make an ai!"
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#9It always puzzled me why Microsoft laid off their ML heavy research group in mountain view, and continues to puzzle me after news like this!
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#10Prepare for Clippy 2.0! (Joke; Microsoft Research are actually highly respected, it's just that like Xerox they have some trouble turning it into products)
http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine
Clippy is an interesting case because they had a good product and then they downgraded it for reasons.
It's kind of frustrating that they could have introduced something brilliant but chose not to.