
Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation - thomas11
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tools-for-the-ai-driven-digital-transformation/
======
gradstudent
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 learns from examples
> and automatically synthesizes code for data transformations using program
> synthesis technology.

What?

> Models can be containerized in Docker and deployed to network edge devices,
> allowing models to score closer to the event and in real-time. Local docker
> deployments can be used for debugging, while for scaled out production
> serving of AI, these containers can be managed with Kubernetes, using Azure
> Container Services.

English, Microsoft. Do you speak it?

~~~
sgt101
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.

------
Top19
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 researchers will climb a tree, sometimes even a tall
one, and then tell you they’ve got all the workings of a space program”

~~~
dEnigma
_" 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.

------
Bhilai
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 independent offerings through Azure like
Cognitive Services,

~~~
NickGerleman
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.

------
pscsbs
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.

~~~
coleca
Something about me feels that these efforts by IBM and Microsoft around AI are
less around providing Open Source tools to democratize AI and more around
providing "big data" style tools to "big enterprise". Both companies made TONS
of $$$ selling Business Intelligence tools (SQL Server Analysis Services,
Cognos, etc). They are smart enough to see the danger in open source tools
like TensorFlow, Spark, etc. cutting into their lucrative revenue streams in
the enterprise.

In particular, Microsoft has always been great about providing tools for no to
low cost at the entry level, to get you (or more likely your company) hooked
into the ecosystem. Not making a criticism, they have made some great stuff
over the years (see the Visual Studio ecosystem for example).

The other angle is providing these tools, which can be complex to
install/configure/manage, as a service offering via a subscription as part of
the Azure platform. Recently MS has been hiring every superstar/rockstar
evangelist/advocate/architect/engineer/etc to help
design/build/promote/advocate for Azure that they can find (See Jessie
Frazelle, @catie, and a ton of key people in the Golang world). Microsoft
isn't just coming to play, they're playing to win.

~~~
zitterbewegung
IBM and Microsoft can embrace the open source tools Tensorflow and Spark by
offering Enterprise Support (I know IBM has made a large investment in Spark).
Their competitors would be databricks and Google. By being simply not Google
that could win over people. Also, both of them need something to differentiate
their cloud offering from Amazon.

------
laichzeit0
Their Text Analytics offering is still for some reason behind IBM Watson (and
I don't even like Watson). Missing: named entity recognition, and multi-label
classification (if they did a hierarchial multi-label classifier, the would be
amazing).

------
cjsuk
Wow now we can look forward to half baked AI implementation for several years
and then abandonment like every MS marketing fad.

------
partycoder
MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1
on the web and on mobile.

However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have
smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product.

This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product
(e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very
organized... Microsoft needs to understand that more and more features doesn't
mean more perceived value.

~~~
zghst
Integration into VS is a huge value add, by doing so MS guarantees that VS
becomes the most easy platform to do ML development in

~~~
partycoder
Many people doing AI/ML right now are not using Windows. By asking them to
move to Visual Studio you are implicitly asking them to move to Windows. Only
by doing that you are making it extremely difficult to adopt such technology.

~~~
contextfree
vscode runs on Windows, Mac and Linux

~~~
unmole
VS and vscode are two entirely different projects.

~~~
contextfree
The product we're talking about is Visual Studio Code Tools for AI; "full"
Visual Studio IDE isn't even mentioned or shown in the announcement article

