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Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

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121–130 of 155 posts

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

#122
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I'll do you one better: "Tay Forms New AI Division at Microsoft."

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

#123
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

You realize you're comparing job offers in the most expensive city in the western hemisphere to offers in Seattle, right?

I was only strictly considering pay because that's what the post/comment thread was about.

Also, Google and Facebook have offices in Seattle, and from what I understand the pay between their HQ and Seattle offices are the same.

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

#124
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize you're comparing job offers in the most expensive city in the western hemisphere to offers in Seattle, right?

I was only strictly considering pay because that's what the post/comment thread was about. Also, Google and Facebook have offices in Seattle, and from what I understand the pay between their HQ and Seattle offices are the same.

it's worth more in seattle because there is no state income tax!

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

#125
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to cool a datacenter?

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

#127
post #111
post #61

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.

$100K for one server? Those are darn good servers.

In this case, it's the GPUs. High six figure servers aren't unheard of in the commodity world (even before you start talking about bigger iron).

Oh yeah, and one word: Fusion-IO.

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

#128

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've just started tinkering with deep learning for a solo project; I recognized pretty quickly that there are many areas where I can't "play with the big boys", but I also realized there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that is accessible to me exactly because the big guys are open sourcing so much. So, I can build products that aren't big enough to interest Google, but include a bunch of tech developed by Google (and ot…

Could you provide an example of a project you'd develop? :-)

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

#129
So, Microsoft is going to put 5000 people on applications of artificial intelligence (AI). Likely they will also include machine learning (ML).

IMHO, there is some value there.

But, IMHO they would be better off just drawing all they can, including AI/ML but much more from the QA section of research libraries. There they will find oceans of material, where in comparison AI/ML look like farm ponds, in pure and applied math as math but also operations research, statistics, optimization, control theory, applied probability, stochastic processes, mathematical finance, mathematical parts of high end electronic engineering, signal processing, experimental design, quantitative methods in business, and much more.

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