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Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

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

#71

Post by taurath »

vessenes wrote: post #21

A 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…

Here's what I imagine - Google will move from a PUSH model where advertisers specify demographics to sell to, to a model where Google tells the advertisers or product owners that they have 200,000 people they could target their ad to and get a 50% sell-through rate guaranteed, which they then take a much higher cut.

Or frankly they probably already do this, and are just increasing that sell-through rate via AI.

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

#72

Post by anoplus »

jacquesm wrote: post #31

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.

Making jobs obsolete is what tech is all about. What the jobless will do is a socio political problem.

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

#73

Post by modeless »

I am intrigued by the mention of "Monthly Q&A" at the end of the email. Is this Satya Nadella's version of Google's TGIF meetings? If so I heartily approve.

I left Microsoft for Google in 2010 and TGIF Q&A was one of the things I appreciated the most about Google culture (despite the occasional screwball live question). I think any company could benefit from a similar tradition.

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

#74

Post by AJ007 »

jomamaxx wrote: post #65
vessenes wrote: post #21

A 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 voi…

https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...

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

#75

Post by NikolaNovak »

johnward wrote: post #67
what_ever wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

Depends what you do.

If you are client-facing consultant, your billable rate is paying:

- Your salary

- Your benefits

- Your expenses (travel, per diem, equipment, software, anything else)

- And then... Salary, benefits, expenses of all your NON-client-facing teammates: Salespeople, marketing, management, client relationship, administrative, HR, etc.

So as a consultant, you are the product, and as such have to be sold at a price that nets enough profit to pay for rest of the organization.

Normally when they say "you cost $150/hour", what they mean is, "you, and all the support framework behind you, needs to be billed at $150/hour to pay off".

Hope that helps. If you're in-house developer and not client-facing, it's harder to understand and justify cost figures, but typically would be nowhere near that rate...

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

#76

Post by pkaye »

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.

Maybe it is because you are burning $20 bills every 5 minutes at work!? They have been trying to make you stop for a long time.

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

#77

Post by clifanatic »

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.

It's that extra piece of coal you insist on burning.

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

#78

Post by illumin8 »

Angostura wrote: post #12
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, 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.

Great point. It seems to me that people are categorizing anything that involves analytics as AI now:

"I asked Cortana to query our clickstream data and she said that men over the age of 50 like to click on Viagra ads."

This is not AI. Although there is some real research going on, it seems that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and using AI as a buzzword.

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

#79

Post by jomamaxx »

AJ007 wrote: post #74
jomamaxx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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 voi…

https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...

Admittedly, that's pretty 'cool' (pun intended) but not $400M kill. I think we still have a long way to go to see AI reap direct rewards for consumers. Payoffs have been minimal/incremental for now.

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

#80

Post by danielcampos93 »

modeless wrote: post #73

I am intrigued by the mention of "Monthly Q&A" at the end of the email. Is this Satya Nadella's version of Google's TGIF meetings? If so I heartily approve. I left Microsoft for Google in 2010 and TGIF Q&A was one of the things I appreciated the most about Google culture (despite the occasional screwball live question). I think any company could benefit from a similar tradition.

Yeah. They host a Q&A session every month and most leader down the totem pole do the same(Scott Guthrie hosts fireside chats)
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