Microsoft poaches former Siri chief from Apple for its AI division

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Microsoft has poached former Siri chief Bill Stasior from Apple to join the company’s artificial intelligence division.

Although Apple was his most recent employer, Stasior actually left the company in May. Stasior will now join Microsoft later this month as corporate vice president and will report to CTO Kevin Scott.

Stasior worked at Apple for almost a decade. Having also held the positions of director of search and navigation at Amazon, director of advanced...

20 August 2019 | Microsoft

Microsoft and OpenAI join forces in the quest for artificial general intelligence

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Microsoft has announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI as part of a shared ambition to achieve the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

If you’ve spent your life binging on sci-fi flicks and shows, today’s AI is far from the likes of HAL and Jarvis. For those kinds of experiences, AGI is needed.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said:

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential...

22 July 2019 | AGI

AI Experts: Dear Amazon, stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement

A group of AI experts have signed an open letter to Amazon demanding the company stops selling facial recognition to law enforcement following bias findings.

Back in January, AI News reported on findings by Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini who researched some of the world's most popular facial recognition algorithms.

Buolamwini found most of the algorithms were biased and misidentified subjects with darker skin colours and/or females more...

4 April 2019 | Amazon

Microsoft wants to get business leaders up to speed on AI

Microsoft is launching AI courses to help business leaders understand how they can harness the technology and gain a competitive advantage.

Last week, AI News reported on a Microsoft study which highlighted that high-growth companies are over twice as likely to be using AI. 41 percent of high-growth companies are using AI compared to just 19 percent of low-growth.

This divide needs to change or small businesses risk falling even further behind. However, overall, less...

12 March 2019 | Enterprise

Microsoft study indicates US businesses are slow to adopt AI

A Microsoft survey of business leaders from various nations has found US firms are particularly slow to adopt AI technology.

One standout result of the study is that German, British, Russian, Dutch, Swiss, and Italian business leaders are – on the whole – reporting they’re “actively implementing” AI ahead of the US.

In fact, of business leaders from the countries surveyed, only France was behind the US.

The survey did not include all countries and is...

8 March 2019 | Microsoft

Microsoft warns its AI offerings ‘may result in reputational harm’

Microsoft has warned investors that its AI offerings could damage the company’s reputation in a bid to prepare them for the worst.

AI can be unpredictable, and Microsoft already has experience. Back in 2016, a Microsoft chatbot named Tay became a racist, sexist, generally-rather-unsavoury character after internet users took advantage of its machine learning capabilities

The chatbot was covered in media around the world and itself was bound to have caused Microsoft some...

6 February 2019 | Ethics

Microsoft and MIT develop AI to fix driverless car ‘blind spots’

Microsoft and MIT have partnered on a project to fix so-called virtual ‘blind spots’ which lead driverless cars to make errors.

Roads, especially while shared with human drivers, are unpredictable places. Training a self-driving car for every possible situation is a monumental task.

The AI developed by Microsoft and MIT compares the action taken by humans in a given scenario to what the driverless car’s own AI would do. Where the human decision is more optimal, the...

28 January 2019 | Connected Cars

Joy Buolamwini: Fighting algorithmic bias needs to be ‘a priority’

Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini gave a speech during the World Economic Forum this week on the need to fight AI bias.

Buolamwini is also an MIT Media Lab researcher and went somewhat viral for her TED Talk in 2016 titled ‘How I’m fighting bias in algorithms’.

Her latest speech included a presentation in which Buolamwini went over an analysis of the current popular facial recognition algorithms.

Here were the overall accuracy results when...

24 January 2019 | Ethics

Microsoft wants AI to predict when a PC is going to be infected

Microsoft wants to harness AI's incredible prediction abilities to detect PC malware attacks before they even happen. The company has sponsored a competition on Kaggle which challenges data scientists to create models which predict if a device is likely to become infected with malware given a current machine state. In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:

“The competition provides academics and researchers with varied backgrounds a fresh opportunity to work on a...

14 December 2018 | Microsoft

Baidu sets record for AI patents in China with 2,368 filings

Baidu, often considered China’s equivalent of Google, has set a record for the number of AI-related patents filed in the country. The search engine giant has filed 2,368 AI patents in China according to PPAC’s Analysis on Artificial Intelligence Patents report. Baidu’s patents are followed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2036), Microsoft (1648), Tencent (1168), and Samsung (1047). The report notes Baidu started late in filing applications, but the company quickly exceeded...

5 December 2018 | China