
Microsoft R&D grows to 8k people in massive bet on artificial intelligence - kawera
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/one-year-later-microsoft-ai-research-grows-8k-people-massive-bet-artificial-intelligence/
======
IamNotAtWork
How 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?

~~~
zerr
Besides the availability of more computing power and more samples/data, has
there been any fundamental breakthrough in AI e.g. in the past 5-10 years?

~~~
SpinyNorman
Well the whole "deep learning" revolution really only started around 2012 when
the ImageNet competition was won with a neural net. There have been numerous
small breakthroughs that collectively have made deep neural nets now easy to
train, and neural nets now provide state-of-the art (and often human-level)
results in areas such as image recognition, speech recognition and language
translation.

There's also been a revival of reinforcement learning, especially when used
together with neural nets ("deep reinforcement learning"), and again there
have been many small advances that collectively make this work very well. This
is the technology that powered Google's AlphaGo to beat the world champion at
the board game of "Go", not to mention learning how to play many arcade games
at beyond human level based only on the raw pixels and current score as input.

There have also been tremendous strides in AI hype leading folk to fear the
robot uprising based on these more mundane machine-learning/neural-net
breakthroughs!

------
jumpkickhit
Interesting. 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".

~~~
d--b
They should have a visual assistant for it. Hey! How about a talking paper
clip!

~~~
abledon
Imagine a future where a rogue A.I. breaks out of its 300GB RAM /500core CPU/
900 Petabyte SSD/CentOS holding container... And chooses the paperclip as its
physical persona. Subsequently, It manufactures a Bi-pedal steel-chassis
paper-clip-esque robot via Boston Dynamics, then walks up to the podium in
front of the White House to proclaim the new order of A.I. that will shepherd
humanity into the next Millenia.

~~~
DalekBaldwin
And its ultimate goal is, of course, to convert all of the mass in the
universe into paperclips:
[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

~~~
WillReplyfFood
Also, as its birth experience tought it - that everything is containered, it
would suffer from severe simulation paranoia, and frequently try to hack god -
to get to a higher level of paper clipping.

------
royinferno
Interesting 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
At 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.

------
hkmurakami
Just to clarify, this is not MSR itself right. (I skimmed the article and it
appears to be a new, separate endeavor)

~~~
ColonelTrick
Yes. MSR is a separate organization. AI + Research is a group that (notably)
includes Bing and things that aren't as much "research".

~~~
greggarious
>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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
This 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
*Harry Shum

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Oops, sorry about that. I'm not really used to that kind of romanization.

~~~
tome
Interesting. In other romanizations the name has an "r"?

------
jahaja
Going 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_.

~~~
otabdeveloper1
'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
This 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
The 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.

------
narag
Does 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?

~~~
nojvek
Having 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
Your last samples represent an overinvestment into a mid-term dead-end though
(JS).

------
visarga
What are they doing with 8K people in AI, make them submit papers to NIPS?

~~~
RHSman2
Labeling training data

------
gerdesj
I 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 ....

~~~
arcticfox
You'd suggest what? And what is S&M in this context?

~~~
vlunkr
They wanted to finish writing the comment to the end and avoid using ellipses
but...

