I think it's important to understand that is really happening here. Microsoft is merging Microsoft Research with their application oriented AI work. See the p

I think it's important to understand that is really happening here. Microsoft is merging Microsoft Research with their application oriented AI work. See the press release from Microsoft (http://mnc.ms/2ddF5dC http://mnc.ms/2ddF5dC). MSR is already a pretty big group at Microsoft and does all sorts of work that is completely unrelated to AI. Now, I am confident the teams within MSR will have to start thinking about AI, and how their work relates to AI, but this initiative is much more of an interdisciplinary effort than a 5000 person deep learning team.