10 ms·
Microsoft R&D grows to 8k people in massive bet on artificial intelligence
- gerdesj 9y agoI actually wanted to read the article end to end but was unable to avoid glazing over. If that is the best that a multi billion dollar mob's S&M dept can manage then I'd suggest ....
- royinferno 9y agoInteresting didn't know they formed a partnership with Amazon to have their AIs work together. Microsoft can't really stand by and let others take the lead in AI research and implementation. So it makes for them to grow their R&D team.
- tanilama 9y agoAt the same time, they don't even have a product! Maybe they should give Xbox more attention, that might be the last consumer hardware that bears some presence that they owned.
- jumpkickhit 9y agoInteresting. Microsoft is fairly good at bringing things into a consumer space. Might be nice to have a future version of Windows see me doing a repetitive task, and just say, "Hey, I can take over this for you if you'd like".
- hanoz 9y agoAs in Hey, it looks like you're writing a letter?
- fish_fan 9y agoYea, but it works & may actually be helpful.
- flamedoge 9y agoor could backfire :U
- kraig911 9y agoSuch an apt music video... Delta Heavy - Ghost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
- abecedarius 9y agoThe research behind Clippy did sound like that -- it was serious AI for its time, using Bayesian networks. From http://erichorvitz.com/lum.htm http://erichorvitz.com/lum.htm it sounds like it was messed with in turning it into a product: "The Office team has employed a relatively simple rule-based system on top of the Bayesian query analysis system to bring the agent to the foreground with a variety of tips. We had been concerned upon hearing this plan that this system would be distracting to users--and hoped that future versions of the Office Assistant would employ our Bayesian approach to guiding speculative assistance actions--coupled with designs we had demonstrated for employing nonmodal windows that do not require dismissal when they are not used."
- narag 9y agoDoes this strategy work? I mean, has it worked before? Can you hire thousands of technical people, throw them at some hard problem and expect they will solve it?
- BlackjackCF 9y agoI've always found that more people doesn't necessarily mean more/better output...
- mhb 9y agoManhattan Project, Apollo.
- narag 9y agoExactly the two ones that I had thought of but... there are big differences. The goals were well defined, the means were known and there was managers and planifications.
- pjungwir 9y agoThe Idea Factory is a history of Bell Labs about just that idea, starting with the first transcontinental telegraph message.
- nojvek 9y agoHaving worked at Microsoft I see how this usually plays out. Lots of teams and people added for the sake of having people. 9 women can't make a baby in a month. Microsoft has a ton of money in the bank and they need to spend it, make acquisitions and see where it sticks. Some of the best work at MS I have seen weirdly had been in small teams with razor focus. Typescript, Vscode.
- 201709User 9y agoYour last samples represent an overinvestment into a mid-term dead-end though (JS).
- hkmurakami 9y agoJust to clarify, this is not MSR itself right. (I skimmed the article and it appears to be a new, separate endeavor)
- ColonelTrick 9y agoYes. MSR is a separate organization. AI + Research is a group that (notably) includes Bing and things that aren't as much "research".
- greggarious 9y ago>MSR is a separate organization. That's putting it mildly. They're separate silos and rarely collaborate. Once research seems "meaty" enough it gets thrown over the wall.
- oldmanhorton 9y agoI work at Microsoft and we have someone from MSR collaborating with my team daily. I am sure some researchers silo themselves and some engineering teams silo themselves, but I don't think its an accurate blanket statement.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThis isn't true, at least for that part of the company. Bing has always had a close connection to a certain part of MSR (e.g. see Harry Shrum).
- tome 9y ago*Harry Shum
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoOops, sorry about that. I'm not really used to that kind of romanization.
- IamNotAtWork 9y agoHow do I get onboard the ML/AI bus? Or do I wait for these smart people to figure it out and then I'll just call their API?
- wilde 9y agofast.ai
- visarga 9y agoYou're right. Doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. You can just use existing tools for 99% of ML applications.
- joe_the_user 9y agoWhat tools are there? Github implementation of current hot papers seems like a good approach. A lot of papers don't come with source code and creating source is useful thing to community. Blogs explaining the mechanics of a paper. A graduate degree in CS or Math might help. If you could do a series of blogs that together are enough to introduce a new person, that could get interest.
- thisisit 9y agoAre there any good reference (blogs, github profiles, forums) for highlighting current hot papers, their implementation or explaining the mechanics?
- eastWestMath 9y agoYou'd probably need to spend a few years learning the basics first...
- thisisit 9y agoAgreed. Sometimes imitation is the best way to learn. So if there are some great resources for source codes being derived from papers, it will help people how to read papers and create code out of it.
- visarga 9y agoWhat are they doing with 8K people in AI, make them submit papers to NIPS?
- 201709User 9y agoThey are manually setting thresholds on individual neurons.
- RHSman2 9y agoLabeling training data
- jahaja 9y agoGoing out on a limb here, but why is taken for granted that the tech sector should be the driving force in AI? For me it makes much more sense if it were in the field of neurology or whatever medical science sector that is appropriate to figure out what intelligence _actually is_.
- meddlepal 9y agoNobody cares about what intelligence actually is just as long as they can package it up and sell it for billions of trillions of dollars to the business and consumer markets.
- shas3 9y agoOrnithologists vs. aeronautical engineers... :)
- otabdeveloper1 9y ago'Artificial intelligence' is just a snazzier name for 'applied statistics'. The goal isn't to create thinking robots, the goal is to extend statistical methods to the realm of unstructured dumps of big data. We don't know what "thinking robots" might be and what they're good for, but we've known about the power of statistics for a century now. Selling statistics + big data to businesses is a no-brainer.
- jahaja 9y agoThis is basically my observation too. That it seems hard to distinguish it from "smart & fancy algoritms". The marketing and hype around it do however imply that it's much more a path to intelligence proper, hence the question above.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoThe truth is that many ML researchers do care about what "intelligence" (better to say cognition) actually is, but all the funding basically comes from applied statistics problems on business data.