It always puzzled me why Microsoft laid off their ML heavy research group in mountain view, and continues to puzzle me after news like this!
a bunch of them now work at Google on the Brain/Tensorflow team. definitely was an odd move.
Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
51–60 of 155 posts
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#525000 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.
Why do you assume they don't know what they're doing? I'd be happy to get a nice salary to work on making myself obsolete.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well a portion of $1B is already accounted for in the balance sheet and budget.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#54To 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.
Are you burning $50s?
Or maybe just really, really bad at your job?
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#55To 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…
>but this time it's different
Don't they always say that?
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#56I love the fact that it took Ballmer to leave for them to really get serious about cutting-edge tech again. Bill Gates are probably wishing he never met Ballmer at Harvard.
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Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, companies are certainly spending a lot of money on something that they are branding AI - I might wait and see how much of it is on real AI - what ever that is.
They don't have to achieve "real AI"; they only need to come up with things that do more work for us to win. Real AI is a fool's goal. Once we achieve that, we will simply be obsolete, I'm in no hurry to get there.
>They don't have to achieve "real AI"; they only need to come up with things that do more work for us to win.
Yeah, can't wait for the new Clippy.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#58I love the fact that it took Ballmer to leave for them to really get serious about cutting-edge tech again. Bill Gates are probably wishing he never met Ballmer at Harvard.
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Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#595000 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.
I'm 100% behind making my personal job obsolete. I don't think it's going to happen in my career, but I'd love to see it.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#60To 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…
> but this time it's different Don't they always say that?
Yes, they do. Sometimes they're wrong, but sometimes they're right!