In early 2016, the artificial brain behind Google’s DeepMind defeated a champion that is world class in a game of Go to the surprise of Elon Musk.
This did not impress Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft as could be seen in the remarks he made in Atlanta at the company’s Ignite event on Monday. Nadella says that instead of getting involved in games, the company was more concerned about getting AI applied into all app, everywhere.
In his words, their reason for pursuing AI is not to be able to beat human beings during games but to empower all institution and persons that with the tools that AI offers so that the problems seen in the society as well as in the economy can be well addressed.
From what Microsoft is saying, the company has invested so much into AI that shows itself in little and big ways. According to Nadella, the digital PA that accompanies Windows 10 named Cortana has 133 million users on a monthly basis.
There are also scenes that are not made so obvious that Microsoft is making use of AI on such as spellcheck that involves ‘red squigglies’ which ultimately makes a writer better at writing and communicating.
They said the other aim they have made available the information they have gotten from AI to software developers to make use of in their app.
This is why Nadella is singing the praises of ‘Cognitive APIs’ used by developers in coming up with applications that make use of Cortana intelligence.
The company’s field programmable gate arrays – FPGAs which is their new computer chip that is powerful was also showed off to show it AI that was optimised. As at the moment, Bing is being powered by FPGAs with Azure cloud to follow suit and will also enable developers to make use of this supercomputing power to create their smarter apps.
The company in a demonstration showed how FPGAs could be used in to automatically translate English language pages in Wikipedia into a totally different language in as little as 1 second.
Google might have a different opinion in the characterization of Microsoft’s cloud with the argument that the same DeepMind in contention is gaining partnership with U.K’s National Health Service with the intention to help patients in tracking health issues. One thing though is right; Microsoft has more developers according to Nadella and is working towards making their company the centre of AI in the revolution that is coming.
