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Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

azure.microsoft.com

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Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#21

Post by pscsbs »

badminton1 wrote: post #7
pscsbs wrote: post #3

This is awesome! I've been waiting for someone to release an Excel-type ML product to make machine learning more accessible. This looks right up that alley, and will probably "democratize" access to ML in a number of fields that tend to be less coding-savvy.

Access to AI/ML is already very democratic. Takes little time to set run Tensorflow from a docker image, or learn from Jupyter notebooks, etc... with fully open source projects where you can consult the source code and see how an algorithm is implemented. In contrast this involves running a proprietary operating system, IDE, closed source, etc... Quite the contrary to anything that could be considered democratic. The…

Takes little time to set run Tensorflow from a docker image, or learn from Jupyter notebooks, etc... with fully open source projects where you can consult the source code and see how an algorithm is implemented.

This is exactly the problem -- what you're describing is not easy for anyone outside of tech to do. If you want to, say, run a simple text classification task and have thousands of labels, this is way overkill. Machine learning has the opportunity to become a common place utility for automating repetitive tasks, and the barrier to entry does not need to be learning Tensorflow, Docker, and Jupyter.

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#22

Post by NickGerleman »

Bhilai wrote: post #8

Sounds like Microsoft is trying to make a big push specially considering the 8000 strong number in their AI division. Interesting juncture as they seem to have an opportunity to catch on. I hear there is a holy war within Microsoft where one sanct feels Windows and Office are still the bread and butter and therefore all AI related investment should go in the direction whereas the other sanct is pushing towards indepe…

I interned at MSFT working on Word. Engineers and PMs in Office see a lot of opportunity in AI. PowerPoint Designer and the newer ML based proofing in Word are good examples of things that have already shipped. I never saw anything resembling a war.

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#25

Post by msalvaris »

gradstudent wrote: post #11

I have a PhD in AI and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what's being announced here. Like, check this out: > Building on advanced research in program synthesis (PROSE) and data cleaning, we have created a data wrangling experience (Figure 1) that drastically reduces the time that data scientists have to spend in transforming data for machine learning. Huh? > Figure 1: AI-powered data wrangling in the workbench…

Here is a link to the PROSE SDK on Github https://github.com/Microsoft/prose

This will probably be more illuminating than the quoted sentence. :)

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#26

Post by msalvaris »

gradstudent wrote: post #11

I have a PhD in AI and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what's being announced here. Like, check this out: > Building on advanced research in program synthesis (PROSE) and data cleaning, we have created a data wrangling experience (Figure 1) that drastically reduces the time that data scientists have to spend in transforming data for machine learning. Huh? > Figure 1: AI-powered data wrangling in the workbench…

For the deployment of ML models in Docker containers have a look at this tutorial https://github.com/Azure/ACS-Deployment-Tutorial

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#27

Post by raverbashing »

Top19 wrote: post #14

Currently reading the work of Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus was widely ridiculed in the 60’s and the 80’s for coming out against AI simply on the grounds that it wouldn’t work, but for those decades at least he was certainly right as it turned out. Reading his book “The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer” from 1983 is haunting and eerily sounds a lot like today. >“AI entrepreneurs and researc…

> “AI entrepreneurs and researchers will climb a tree, sometimes even a tall one, and then tell you they’ve got all the workings of a space program”

Sounds more like a cranky Luddite than anything else. "on the grounds that it wouldn’t work", lovely argument right there. The list of inventions that "wouldn't work" is vast, including trains, aircraft, personal computers, etc

All modern inventions started as feeble/underpowered/clunky inventions

Compare Atari graphics with PS4 ones

Compare the first works with Mnist digit recognition to what Snapchat filters or AlphaGo do

But that's fine since skeptics means less competition to those who actually make things work

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#28

Post by sgt101 »

gradstudent wrote: post #11

I have a PhD in AI and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what's being announced here. Like, check this out: > Building on advanced research in program synthesis (PROSE) and data cleaning, we have created a data wrangling experience (Figure 1) that drastically reduces the time that data scientists have to spend in transforming data for machine learning. Huh? > Figure 1: AI-powered data wrangling in the workbench…

Do you have enterprise experience as well? I have an ML Ph.D. and 20 years of enterprise AI, and from my perspective these do make sense.

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#29

Post by dEnigma »

Top19 wrote: post #14

Currently reading the work of Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus was widely ridiculed in the 60’s and the 80’s for coming out against AI simply on the grounds that it wouldn’t work, but for those decades at least he was certainly right as it turned out. Reading his book “The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer” from 1983 is haunting and eerily sounds a lot like today. >“AI entrepreneurs and researc…

"simply on the grounds that it wouldn’t work"

That is a weird position to hold. Surely he must realize that it will work some day; or does he believe there is something more to human-like intelligence, that can never be achieved in silicon? I'm not saying we are close, or that the currently available tools are enough, but at some point in the future we will be there.

Re: Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

#30

Post by ansible »

Top19 wrote: post #14

Currently reading the work of Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus was widely ridiculed in the 60’s and the 80’s for coming out against AI simply on the grounds that it wouldn’t work, but for those decades at least he was certainly right as it turned out. Reading his book “The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer” from 1983 is haunting and eerily sounds a lot like today. >“AI entrepreneurs and researc…

We've reached a cross-over point though.

Current-generation ML techniques have proven business value. You can talk to your phone, and it understands a decent set of common actions to be performed. It is now mass-market.

Businesses see the value of the existing ML systems, and can also see that investments in incremental improvements will pay dividends. And so, investment will continue.

Meanwhile, we're finally starting to figure out the actual architecture that allows us to think and move. [1] With continued research, we'll see progress there as well.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-unc...

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