Nadella said that Microsoft is working towards democratising AI. Taking a slight dig at Google and IBM, Nadella said, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.” This was clearly in reference to the news reports of how Google’s AI has been effective in defeating humans in Chinese board game Go as well as IBM’s Watson defeating humans at Jeopardy.
“We are pursuing AI, so that we can empower every person and every institution that people build with tools of AI. So that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy. That’s the pursuit,” said Nadella.
According to Nadella, Microsoft is working towards analysing mountains of data which is produced by consumers or businesses and then making sense of it by presenting it in a legible way to people. Microsoft is approaching AI via what it calls as ‘four core pillars. Namely agents, applications, services and infrastructure. And needless to say each of these pillars is associated with a related Microsoft service.
Cortana, the digital assistant of Microsoft will be an agent, which will be a new organising layer which will sit across all applications you will use in your life. Microsoft Office and Dynamics software can function as applications. According to Nadella, Microsoft Dynamics is capable of sifting through third party apps such as LinkedIn to point out where changes are made on this app.
Cortana being open to third party developers to help them use it to build their own apps is an example of services said Nadella.
Nadella also mentioned that Microsoft is using custom computer chips to help crunch information quicker and better manage traffic in data centres.
Deep learning is a major component of all the products and services making use of AI. This lets organisations feed large amounts of data in to neural networks, which mimic the human brain in a way to understand links between information and data sets. Google and Facebook have been using deep learning for things such as improving search results, image recognition, speech translation and so on.