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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

#131

Post by dmead »

SwellJoe wrote: post #106
rifung wrote: 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-...

My information may be out of date. My friends who've chosen between Google and Microsoft got better offers from MS; though often ended up going to Google anyway, because they just liked it better. But, it was all several years ago.

Google has a consistent reputation for paying a bit lower than other giants.

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

#132

Post by SwellJoe »

liamzebedee wrote: post #128
SwellJoe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :-)

I'll be posting a Show HN post in a few weeks with one of those ideas.

But, there's a bunch of ideas I've brainstormed around using things like sentiment analysis and other kinds of very simple-to-use AI concepts for automating tedious stuff. Things like automatically triaging support requests based on how angry the customer sounds, or based on keywords and an analysis of earlier requests; off-the-shelf NLP algorithms can do this today (and Google uses it that way for their own support tools, but doesn't make it widely available in that form, though Inbox has some of that kind of tech working in it). All you need is training data and some familiarity with Python.

My brainstorming exercise goes something like this: Append "with spooky powers" to a bunch of common things until one of them seems cool and useful to me. So, "forum notifications bot with spooky powers", "IRC bot with spooky powers", "twitter bot with spooky powers", "customer relationship management with spooky powers", "analytics with spooky powers", "server monitoring with spooky powers", "log analysis with spooky powers", etc. And I try to think of what I would use such a thing for, if it existed. Then, I sit down and see if I can make it real. The Yahoo NSFW image detection announcement reminded me of ideas I had and tinkered with a decade ago when I worked on a content filtering system for schools...the difference is that now we have the horsepower, the data sets, and the algorithms to actually make it work (but, I haven't worked in that field in a decade and never really liked being a purveyor of censorship tools, even if only for children, anyway).

Anyway, the possibilities are kinda huge and wide open. Many of these ideas will fizzle out, even the ones that look promising, but as with the Internet a lot of millionaires are going to be made by people saying, "It's like X, but with AI." just as people used to say, "It's like X, but on the Internet."

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

#133

Post by thr0waway1239 »

Despite the general positive spin around it ("we did it as a learning project"), most people would agree that Tay was both a technical and a PR failure.

But the pattern does repeat: Microsoft releases an AI which fails. Tesla's autopilot cannot "see" white object on white background. Apparently, Google also had a crash which is recently being claimed as human error. My guess is that this list is not going to stop here.

Suppose I ask you to build me a teleporting machine. You try, and like the movie Spaceballs, my torso and up comes out aligned wrong. This is now declared part of the iterative learning process, except that the cost borne by the corporations for the failure is quite minuscule compared to the cost borne by the affected party (risk asymmetry).

So while people talk about the huge advancements in AI, shouldn't we be quite skeptical especially at this point? Since none of us have seen the alternate parallel universes, and considering

a) the resources being thrown at the problem

b) the risk asymmetry involved

c) the privacy intrusion involved in the data collection (you knew I would bring it up, didn't you?) and not to mention

d) the inability of anyone to demand any kind of transparency from these AI pioneers

I can as well ask, are we as a society paying too high a cost for this progress? Could we really not do any better than this?

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

#134

Post by sudoscript »

SwellJoe wrote: post #132
liamzebedee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll be posting a Show HN post in a few weeks with one of those ideas. But, there's a bunch of ideas I've brainstormed around using things like sentiment analysis and other kinds of very simple-to-use AI concepts for automating tedious stuff. Things like automatically triaging support requests based on how angry the customer sounds, or based on keywords and an analysis of earlier requests; off-the-shelf NLP algorithm…

That's a really neat way to brainstorm. Let me add one more thing.

The big companies have an advantage in hardware and research. But they dont care about niche applications of their tech, because prizes worth less than $1B don't matter at their scale. That's where I try to focus on.

The key challenge is data. Too many AI startups get stuck in the "give us your data and we'll do some awesome stuff." That almost never works. [This](http://mattturck.com/2016/09/29/building-an-ai-startup/) talk does a really good job explaining why. The trick is figuring out how to get enough initial data to deliver value upfront.

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

#135

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

icebraining wrote: post #49
aub3bhat wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

Sure, its a ton of money, but they've had $20+ billion/quarter in revenue the last four quarters.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/financials?p=MSFT

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

#136

Post by Animats »

hindsightbias wrote: post #126

It's funny, the internet isn't old enough to find links to the CYC project in Austin that blew through hundreds of millions of DoD money in the 80's and early 90's. What's old is new.

Cyc and Lenat are still around.[1] Here's Lenat at SXSW 2016.[2]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cycorp-ai-2014-7 [2] https://vimeo.com/158956032

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

#137

Post by eggy »

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…

I think 200k as an average is good, since some will be making a whole lot more, and there will be the 100K per year positions too.

My equivalent to your dearth of people in the know in 2011, was studying AL (Artificial Life) in 1990s, and nobody heard of it. It included the study of ANNs, GAs, GP and AI in general (which I prefer to call CI - Computational Intelligence nowadays). The book that started it all for me [0].

There were no immediate applications aside from expert systems here and there, and the fuzzy logic appliance controllers coming out of Japan. However, now, with self-driving cars, recommender systems, image recognition (face-matching surveillance post 9/11) have big pay-offs or budgets to spend on it.

VR is having its second renaissance. I thought the first time it would have taken off even with the clunky glasses and headsets, since gaming was already such a huge money industry.

And now with modeling becoming prominent again, AL paradigms are being modified, created and repurposed for all sorts of cool things. I play with NetLogo since it is a fun environment for that [1].

My only regret is that I was in at the beginning, but left it to pursue other things, and so I am not at the level of practice to get one of those 200K jobs. I still kept studying it all these years though, and I have coded my own bits and pieces, but mainly for conceptual pieces, art and music, not practical applications. I play with Darknet [2] now, since C was my second language after Assembly (6502 and then x86_32), and it is great fun, and fast. A very understandable and manageable platform.

I am hoping it all leads someday to keeping me alive longer to enjoy studying some more, because as I get older that's really what I enjoy most aside from family!

[0] http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387976143

[1] https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

[2] http://pjreddie.com/darknet/

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

#138

Post by 2bitencryption »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #84
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…

Where did you get that this is entirely Deep Learning? Not a single mention of that anywhere.

Also, am I misunderstanding, or is the "Deep" part of Deep Learning not a very quantifiable thing? I.e. there's no rule that says "Your neural net isn't 'deep' unless it has X amount of layers or N amount of nodes per layer" or anything. It just specifies using large neural networks for examining a huge amount of data and feature set. Right?

So really, any AI-based learning is going to be "deep" from now on, simply because we've reached the point where we can handle large neural nets and complex datasets, right?

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

#139

Post by SwellJoe »

sudoscript wrote: post #134
SwellJoe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be posting a Show HN post in a few weeks with one of those ideas. But, there's a bunch of ideas I've brainstormed around using things like sentiment analysis and other kinds of very simple-to-use AI concepts for automating tedious stuff. Things like automatically triaging support requests based on how angry the customer sounds, or based on keywords and an analysis of earlier requests; off-the-shelf NLP algorithm…

That's a really neat way to brainstorm. Let me add one more thing. The big companies have an advantage in hardware and research. But they dont care about niche applications of their tech, because prizes worth less than $1B don't matter at their scale. That's where I try to focus on. The key challenge is data. Too many AI startups get stuck in the "give us your data and we'll do some awesome stuff." That almost never…

Good slide deck, and I agree with most of it (and what I don't agree with is probably my own ignorance of the field).

I suspect there will be very few "pure AI" startups, and a ton of regular old tech startups that figure out how AI fits into their business faster than their competitors or figure out how to use it for a business advantage or to deliver a service that couldn't exist in that way before AI. With the early "like X but on the Internet" startups, the ones that succeeded in the biggest way (Amazon, for example) were the ones that built a great X that leveraged the internet to make it an order of magnitude better X.

So, Amazon was the best book store because they got everything right about being a regular bookstore (good prices, good service, efficient sales channel, solid relationships with publishers) and had damned near every book and could serve customers everywhere; a thing that is only possible on the Internet.

So, the best "X except with AI" company will be a great X company, and then AI will allow them to do some kind of force multiplier to push them to the top of the heap. That means we need to look for opportunities that currently require a lot of resources (say, people, or vehicles, or ) and can have AI added to it to make it produce 10x value given the same inputs. Even 2x value could be a big enough difference to beat your competitors at market, but the real out-of-the-park success stories probably need an order-of-magnitude boost from AI, even if it starts out slower because AI is still clumsy and most of the small companies are starting with tiny data sets (relatively speaking).

Anyway, mostly I think it's cool to play with. I think I see some ways to provide value and make some money with it, but it'll be as much an experiment as a business plan in the short term.

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

#140

Post by siculars »

int_19h wrote: post #117
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comparing MS salaries in Redmond to Google salaries in Mountain View is rather apples and oranges. Cost of living is different (esp. once you start shopping for houses), state taxes are drastically different etc. Now, Google also has an office in Kirkland. That would be an interesting place to compare. But it's also not particularly large.

I don't appreciate the "cost of living" salary differential excuse, and let me tell you why... Ask yourself, does Microsoft charge me less for Windows or Office if I live in, say, Kansas? No, they don't.
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