5000 more people working hard to make themselves obsolete. I wonder how long it will take those working on AI to figure out that they're doing to themselves and the rest of the IT industry what the IT industry has already done to many others. If and when they succeed we'll finally know the true meaning of the term disruption.
Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
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Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably will be something more like the Kinect: a few products come out that aren't useful at all. It took decades before people figured out Aluminum was actually useful for things for example. It was a chemical curiosity for the later-half of the 1800s (hmm, this is a cheap metal that is found everywhere. But its weaker than steel, what should we use it for?) Just because you discover something useful doesn't me…
Aluminum (metal, not ore) was actually extremely expensive until the discovery of the electrolytic Hall–Héroult process ca 1880.
Yup. The reason why it was not used for a long time is that it was hard to make. Aluminum is a very reactive metal; when combined with oxygen or other stuff, it sits at the bottom of a deep pit of energy. It takes a lot of effort to get it out of there. The electrolytic process is basically a brute-force approach: throw enough energy at anything, and it will start moving eventually.
Napoleon III had his fancy-dinner utensils made from aluminum, for those occasions when gold did not seem lavish enough. And then cheap manufacturing was invented, and the rest is history.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#33How can they possibly staff a 5000 person ai division. Sounds to me like only a small-ish subset will be talented ai researchers.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#34Prepare 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.
The Clippy for Resharper[1] extension is my second favorite joke extension after the Visual Studio Achievements[2] extension.
[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2014/04/01/clippy-for-resh...
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/zainnab/2012/02/28/visual-s...
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#35To 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 2…
Well its not 5000 new people I assume ~70% would be restructuring (E.g. as the article states from Bing and Cortana). Even then at 1500 new employees, its a huge undertaking and vote of confidence into importance of AI.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#36To 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 2…
Microsoft is spending a ~billion dollars a year on their entire research department, which AI is a part of.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#37A friend of mine was an early investor in DeepMind. For like a year and a half, because that's how long it took Google to buy them out for somewhere around $400mm. At the time, I thought that sounded like an amazing exit (OK, it still sounds like an amazing exit), and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe. I was so, so, wrong. The amount of value hidden and public in that acquisit…
How would we know if they are doing amazing things with AdWords, if we're all running uBlock/AdBlock/etc?
There was an internet marketing manager on a podcast I listened to once that said the number of people using adblockers on the internet is essentially negligible, it's in the millions but a small percentage of all users (edit: the Podcast was Talking Machines (about machine learning) http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would we know if they are doing amazing things with AdWords, if we're all running uBlock/AdBlock/etc?
There was an internet marketing manager on a podcast I listened to once that said the number of people using adblockers on the internet is essentially negligible, it's in the millions but a small percentage of all users ( edit: the Podcast was Talking Machines (about machine learning) http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/
This[1] is from a year ago, before ad-blocking became widely available on mobile, and they're still looking at hundreds of millions of users using adblockers.
I don't know how reputable PageFair is, but they estimate more than 20% of smartphone users are adblocking now[2].
[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-blockin...
[2] https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#39A friend of mine was an early investor in DeepMind. For like a year and a half, because that's how long it took Google to buy them out for somewhere around $400mm. At the time, I thought that sounded like an amazing exit (OK, it still sounds like an amazing exit), and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe. I was so, so, wrong. The amount of value hidden and public in that acquisit…
Remember that this is, in large part, a restructuring of existing orgs and investments. I wouldn't interpret this as the starting gun for AI/deep-learning investments at Microsoft. There's been heavy R&D investment for years in this space making its way into products like Cortana, Bing, PowerBI, Skype, Cognitive Services, etc. Similarly, there's a non-public side to the results at Microsoft I'm sure. So I don't think catchup is a fair analysis.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#40I feel like, as a solo app developer, I'm being left out of this 'revolution'.
It seems like deep learning only makes sense if you have enough data to feed the algorithm with. The kind of data that only big companies can produce or harvest.
Sure you can produce some video and audio data and you can spider the web a little bit, but that doesn't even come close to the resources that these big corporations have and the 'depth' of learning that they can achieve.
So I'm not even trying.
Or should I ?
Is there any place for solo/indy developers in this field ?