Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#41

Post by bigdataq » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

To 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…

Can you help us understand what you think this new division will be producing? What are a few deep learning-enabled products or projects that are in production and generating revenues?

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#42

Post by johnward » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

To 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…

>(which is conservative if you include benefits, etc.)

I've never been able to figure out how my employer says I cost them $280 per hour.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#43

Post by amenghra » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

delegate wrote: post #40

I 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…

I have seen small companies build better product targeting than Fb/Google/etc do with their ads.

Yes you have less data, but your users are probably more similar to each other and less scattered all over the place.

While I feel this is true for recommendation engines, it might not be true for other AI applications.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#44

Post by skybrian » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

delegate wrote: post #40

I 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…

I don't know much about it, but there are public datasets you can train on and contests you can enter.

But this seems more like doing research in hopes of coming up with something new that big companies will be interested in. Or, if that doesn't happen, learning enough so that they can hire you as a researcher or consultant.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#45

Post by bcx » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

To 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…

I think it's important to understand that is really happening here. Microsoft is merging Microsoft Research with their application oriented AI work. See the press release from Microsoft (http://mnc.ms/2ddF5dC).

MSR is already a pretty big group at Microsoft and does all sorts of work that is completely unrelated to AI. Now, I am confident the teams within MSR will have to start thinking about AI, and how their work relates to AI, but this initiative is much more of an interdisciplinary effort than a 5000 person deep learning team.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#46

Post by amirathi » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:11 PM UTC

How do you really start a 5000 person division at once and expect to succeed?

I assume AI development is a niche field. And you would want smaller dedicated teams of brilliant researchers and practitioners focusing on a single problem.

I can't imagine the overhead in maintaining and operating such a large division. I hope they know what they are doing.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#47

Post by what_ever » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:14 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #42

dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

To 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…

>(which is conservative if you include benefits, etc.) I've never been able to figure out how my employer says I cost them $280 per hour.

$280/hour is $280 * 40 * 52 = 582400/year btw. I think your figures are off.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#48

Post by web007 » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:15 PM UTC

delegate wrote: post #40

I 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…

Depending on what you're trying to do you have some options, but you should probably outsource.

Option 1: If you're working on image recognition or anything similar, it's easy to get a ton of data. There are many corpora of image data available, probably on the order of hundreds of terabytes, with tags or at least some structured data. If you're going to "spider the web" you should use Common Crawl instead, and can access all of Blekko's data for the cost of data transfer via AWS. Same for text data, use the Google N-gram corpus.

Knowing that all of that exists, I would still recommend Option 2: outsourcing your AI needs unless you're a researcher or have a decent budget for AI development. Go search "ai api" and pick one that matches what you want to do. Match your skill and risk tolerance; nobody got fired for using IBM, but you may get a better experience from a startup with the possibility of flaming out in a year. You'll get the leverage of whatever company is spending those dollars on your behalf, and you'll be able to concentrate on the user experience instead of the science-ey part.

Option 3 is "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Go work for MS / GOOG / FB / IBM building something, and get access to those resources for yourself. Then at some point in the future you'll know their API interface, and you can go back to option #2 with much better data.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#49

Post by icebraining » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:16 PM UTC

aub3bhat wrote: post #35

dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

To 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.

Except for severance and hiring bonuses, what's the difference between restructuring someone's job, or firing them and hiring another person? In the end, you're still committing $1B/year to AI jobs.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#50

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 7:16 PM UTC

amirathi wrote: post #46

How do you really start a 5000 person division at once and expect to succeed? I assume AI development is a niche field. And you would want smaller dedicated teams of brilliant researchers and practitioners focusing on a single problem. I can't imagine the overhead in maintaining and operating such a large division. I hope they know what they are doing.

[deleted]