How can they possibly staff a 5000 person ai division. Sounds to me like only a small-ish subset will be talented ai researchers.
You're probably right. There's always overhead to a project. Testers, Analysts, Managers, Dev Ops...
Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
91–100 of 155 posts
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#92I 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…
Results for 'deep learning' were completely irrelevant.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#93Look and then in few years they will have to fire those people.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#94To 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…
"$200k per year" is only conservative if you look at tech jobs in San Francisco. It is an substantial amount of money in the rest of the world.
Microsoft historically pays slightly better than Google and other valley companies. And, the cost of an employee is usually significantly higher than the salary alone. Something like 30%-60% higher, when factoring in benefits, cost of providing offices, stock options, etc. So, $200k is pretty conservative in many tech hubs, not just the valley, particularly when you're talking about people involved in research (who are more likely to have obtained graduate degrees).
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Results for 'deep learning' were completely irrelevant.
Thanks for the report - that hasn't been an area I've focused one, but I'll work on that one.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#96I 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…
The obvious focus is deep learning, but those models need data, trained and deployed. There is a lot of work on those edges that require some AI knowledge. Also don't forget there are lots of AI techniques that are just as important now. So focus on an area that interests you, learn some of those AI methods and go! Every developer in the future will have to understand some of these methods at a basic level.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#97What is the current fascination with AI? It seems to be talked about everywhere right now. Yet "AI" in a core sense has been around since the 70's...
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's about internal power, even at the expense of the companies wellbeing. These layoffs were in the context of a larger set of layoffs that Satya undertook as his first big move at MS. Satya was getting across the board pushback from lots of different warring orgs at MS. He even had to bring the Big G out of retirement to help him out. So by taking out the top dogs he becomes the top dog. I don't even blame Satya for doing it - it's human nature that required it. If he didn't do it he would have eventually been pushed out of MS for not getting anything done. It's why drug cartels are so violent, it's why our election choices are Clinton and Trump. At least he's less evil than Sinofsky and Ballmer who were both cartoonishly horrible.
Good people have been leaving MS for a very long time. But big company corporate politics are really toxic in the US. MS is actually one of the better ones. Intel, Amazon, Netflix are much worse. Facebook and Google are on the decline. Yahoo.... yeah
As for this AI thing, my bet is that it is mostly fluff. Most people will ignore it until the next re-org comes along. There was a similar thing with Big Data at MSR a number of years ago and look what happened there.
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"$200k per year" is only conservative if you look at tech jobs in San Francisco. It is an substantial amount of money in the rest of the world.
Microsoft historically pays slightly better than Google and other valley companies. And, the cost of an employee is usually significantly higher than the salary alone. Something like 30%-60% higher, when factoring in benefits, cost of providing offices, stock options, etc. So, $200k is pretty conservative in many tech hubs, not just the valley, particularly when you're talking about people involved in research (who a…
Where are you getting this information from? I got an offer from Microsoft and it definitely wasn't even close to what people who get offers from FB or Google get.
Anecdotally, pay I've seen from Google and FB are higher than Microsoft/Amazon, but of course that's not saying much. Still, the first source I can find matches what I've seen: https://blog.step.com/2016/04/08/an-open-source-project-for-...
Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"$200k per year" is only conservative if you look at tech jobs in San Francisco. It is an substantial amount of money in the rest of the world.
Microsoft historically pays slightly better than Google and other valley companies. And, the cost of an employee is usually significantly higher than the salary alone. Something like 30%-60% higher, when factoring in benefits, cost of providing offices, stock options, etc. So, $200k is pretty conservative in many tech hubs, not just the valley, particularly when you're talking about people involved in research (who a…
Microsoft pays well, but this is the first time I've heard them paying better than google. When I was at MS, there were always complaints about losing potential hires to Google over much higher salaries.