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Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#11

Post by viksit »

roymurdock wrote: post #2

More interesting info on Maluuba's 2 actual, recently-released datasets: http://datasets.maluuba.com/ Their "News QA dataset" contains 120k Q&As collected from CNN articles: Documents are CNN news articles. Questions are written by human users in natural language. Answers may be multiword passages of the source text. Questions may be unanswerable. NewsQA is collected using a 3-stage, siloed process. Questioners see o…

Just FYI the frames dataset hasn't been available for download since the day they "released" it (although the QA dataset has been). If it is - someone do let me know :)

"Frame tracking" and adaptive slot filling without pre-canning is actually a very active area of research - the goal is to provide not just an Eliza style infinite conversational ability, but to be able to reason about and get the user to a specific outcome in a real world use case by prompting them for information in a semi supervised manner.

Being able to do it via a series of differentiable (calculus wise) functions is a fundamental improvement in achieving convergence between statistical systems and logical reasoning (which harks back to "classical" AI problems such as planning). Microsoft has some very interesting research here and papers like these [1][2]. Maluuba has some good stuff here as well. [3][4]

I doubt the company was acquired for their datasets. They've been a well respected AI company with some top notch researchers, and I think their area of research gels well with MSR's own NLP research.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01269

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/unsuper...

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02605

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05151

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#12

Post by dforrestwilson1 »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #3

MS has always shown that they can do research, halolens is one such product and the recent ML enablement spree is another example. It is a good thing that they are going beyond their comfort zone of milking Windows. What is interesting is to see if their efforts make any difference in the status quo. I say this after using AzureML, which I liked, there is no such thing on the internet which allows you to write a ML m…

Thanks for the comment I had not seen this before.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/

^Basic version is free to use!

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#13

Post by oedenfield »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #3

MS has always shown that they can do research, halolens is one such product and the recent ML enablement spree is another example. It is a good thing that they are going beyond their comfort zone of milking Windows. What is interesting is to see if their efforts make any difference in the status quo. I say this after using AzureML, which I liked, there is no such thing on the internet which allows you to write a ML m…

It also has a Jupyter Notebook service piece currently in preview.

https://notebooks.azure.com/

(full disclosure: employee here)

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#14

Post by paulsutter »

roymurdock wrote: post #9
deepnotderp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maluuba has real researchers from MILA and university of Toronto. It was an acquihire.

Understood, I'm looking for an analysis - it would cost x to hire the same size team of researchers with comparable research experience for the same amount of time to build out these datasets as proof-of-concept products, plus whatever other costs an ML research team accrues.

You're missing the variable N, the number of times you'd have to repeat the experiment to replicate the quality of the results. N might be 10, might be 100.

As an analyst it should be easy for you to figure out x for Maluuba, just McKinsey it. But that isn't really a meaningful number. Researchers aren't fungible commodities traded on an exchange.

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#15

Post by deepnotderp »

roymurdock wrote: post #9
deepnotderp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maluuba has real researchers from MILA and university of Toronto. It was an acquihire.

Understood, I'm looking for an analysis - it would cost x to hire the same size team of researchers with comparable research experience for the same amount of time to build out these datasets as proof-of-concept products, plus whatever other costs an ML research team accrues.

Researchers aren't commodities.

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#16

Post by roymurdock »

paulsutter wrote: post #14
roymurdock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood, I'm looking for an analysis - it would cost x to hire the same size team of researchers with comparable research experience for the same amount of time to build out these datasets as proof-of-concept products, plus whatever other costs an ML research team accrues.

You're missing the variable N, the number of times you'd have to repeat the experiment to replicate the quality of the results. N might be 10, might be 100. As an analyst it should be easy for you to figure out x for Maluuba, just McKinsey it. But that isn't really a meaningful number. Researchers aren't fungible commodities traded on an exchange.

Sure, but I think the size of a research team's budget/grant allocation is a good proxy for how "valuable" that research team is. Also, just because you and I are paid salaries doesn't make us commodities, but it does give info on our worth to our organization's/context in the overall economy.

Someone had to evaluate this deal, and I'm interested in understanding the process behind valuing something so far-removed from any commercial product or market.

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#17

Post by roymurdock »

webmaven wrote: post #10
roymurdock wrote: post #2

More interesting info on Maluuba's 2 actual, recently-released datasets: http://datasets.maluuba.com/ Their "News QA dataset" contains 120k Q&As collected from CNN articles: Documents are CNN news articles. Questions are written by human users in natural language. Answers may be multiword passages of the source text. Questions may be unanswerable. NewsQA is collected using a 3-stage, siloed process. Questioners see o…

> how expensive it would be to build out these datasets? Assuming you have the expertise necessary to design and run the process in-house, the major expense is going to be compensating the humans in the loop, which can add up quickly. This is why organizations that already have access to large datasets have such a huge advantage. I think that one of the reasons we're seeing such a rush to deploy chatbots is that even…

Thanks for the pointers - I'm looking forward to seeing how AI/ML is brought to market, as we hear a lot about research but not as much on the product side just yet. Sounds like MSFT will be pushing in this direction as well with the Maluuba team:

Last fall, we formed the Artificial Intelligence and Research organization, bringing engineering and research closer together to accelerate the pipeline from cutting-edge research to product development. Maluuba, too, has closely aligned its research and engineering teams, and we’re looking forward to learning from their experiences as well.

Re: Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba

#19

Post by paulsutter »

roymurdock wrote: post #16
paulsutter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the variable N, the number of times you'd have to repeat the experiment to replicate the quality of the results. N might be 10, might be 100. As an analyst it should be easy for you to figure out x for Maluuba, just McKinsey it. But that isn't really a meaningful number. Researchers aren't fungible commodities traded on an exchange.

Sure, but I think the size of a research team's budget/grant allocation is a good proxy for how "valuable" that research team is. Also, just because you and I are paid salaries doesn't make us commodities, but it does give info on our worth to our organization's/context in the overall economy. Someone had to evaluate this deal, and I'm interested in understanding the process behind valuing something so far-removed fr…

If you want to know /how "valuable" that research team is/, find out what Microsoft paid for the Maluuba. The number is not in line with their salaries. A few notes on that:

"Ex-Googler Sebastian Thrun says the going rate for self-driving talent is $10 million per person" http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-sel...

"Artificial Intelligence Teams Being Acquired For $2.5m/employee; Employee Value Often Far Exceeds Business Value" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artificial-intelligence-teams...

"DeepMind was said to have around 75 employees when Google picked it up in 2014. If the deal closed at the rumored amount, that would put the cost per employee at an eye-popping $6.66 million. Magic Pony is said to have had a team of 14 when it was acquired by Twitter—$10.7 million per employee." http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/tech-giants-paying-big-mo...

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