With a billion I could get a cloud of 10,000 servers with 16 GPU cards... mmm, lots of GPUs...
Or 5000 employees and 5000 servers each with 8 GPUs.
Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
61–70 of 155 posts
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#62I 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…
You can do some cool stuff with the APIs and datasets the big companies provide.
Most are typically priced per API call with generous free tiers. I expect these will get cheaper. I'm working on a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com) - for ~30k API requests I've been able to do everything free.
A lot of interesting large data sets are hosted in the "cloud" too for you to use for research, so you can get at them that way.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#63Something something mythical man month?
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#64It 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.
This was Satya sending the strong message that no-one is untouchable and everyone must get inline or they will be next. It's actually a common strategy that requires the victims to be their best people. Obviously you can't to this too many times. Politics as usual.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#65A 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…
" and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe."
Tell us, how the valuation can be justified in terms of dollars.
Which 'AI' products are useful in the portfolio today, that makes products useful to you and I, that are derived from DeepMind?
The fact is - 'AI' is really short-hand for Multi-layer Neural nets - and they are applying those things in some very specific areas such as voice recognition and image recognition.
I think there will be many more places where we can do this - but I think it's going to be a very long time before we get to 'true AI'.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#66Earlier 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/
I always wondered what would happen if say MS and Apple decided to just block ads by default on systems with their OSs.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>(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.
I need to bill out at an amount higher that that to be profitable to the company. They don't pay me anything near that.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#68Something something mythical man month?
Exactly.
The bulk of 'practical AI' don't come from massive products, like 'Office' - but from very specific neural algorithms, applied to very specific things - done by a few people.
That said - this kind of research may benefit from a lot of concurrent research.
Also - there are a couple of strategic issues:
1) Prestige - it's important to be recognized as 'a leader' to maintain brand cachet among tech talent
2) Talent Hoarding - Google, FB and MS are each big enough to tilt the landscape in any specific field. It's actually economically viable for them to pay the best talent to sit in a lab and fiddle, even while accomplishing little, over letting the talent go to competitors.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#69To 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, that there are 5000 employees suggests we don't have to worry quite yet. I'll panic when the headline is "Microsoft Forms New Zero Person AI Division" :)
Or even worse... "Cortana Forms New AI Division at Microsoft."
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
a bunch of them now work at Google on the Brain/Tensorflow team. definitely was an odd move.
This was Satya sending the strong message that no-one is untouchable and everyone must get inline or they will be next. It's actually a common strategy that requires the victims to be their best people. Obviously you can't to this too many times. Politics as usual.
Can you elaborate on how that works? If the victims are their best people who are doing solid, profitable work, laying them off seems like it would create a state of uncertainty which, in this climate, might just cause people to jump ship because competitive jobs are just around the corner.
Or was there some issue with the group where they had to sacrifice the good with the bad due to lack of overall profitability?