The link title is misleading. MS will not have 5k people working on AI. They merged their MS Research and their AI engineering team. It's not like they are going to drop all the other research they are doing to focus solely on AI. The new org is called the AI and Research Group. This is just a reorganization to democratize some of the resources available within MS.

Hope not... their rise4fun teams are some of the best stuff I can find on the web. Please keep that fundamental research alive.

I don't understand how that's not the same. Ok, they are not hiring 5000 new people, but the end result is the same.

there are people who research things besides AI

with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company’s AI product efforts.

Only if you stretch that definition beyond what most people are comfortable doing. The org includes the entire Bing team, for example. This would be like Google saying they have an x,xxx big AI team because they include the whole Search org, or the Apps org because they use ML in their products, too, and so do the Maps Mobile team, etc ad infinitum.

It's great that MS is merging these dispersed orgs, and the actual headline is fine, but calling it a "5,000 person AI division" is disingenuous at best.

This seems good strategy. I am no expert, but AFAIK Microsoft research division is maybe (the) most advanced and most achieved research division in whole industry. Just look at people with H-Index more than 30 who works in Microsoft research.

I wouldn't be surprised, they are very happy to pay smart people to work part time on their favorite problems (Simon Peyton Jones for example)

Remember when we missed 'The Internet' ... let's not miss 'AI'

Microsoft is going in right direction. New CEO seems to know what he is doing.

That's scary. The world is rushing full speed towards AGI. Yet few are working on or care about the hard problem of actually controlling AGI.

So Microsoft finally will be able to implement Clippy properly :-)

Clippy is pretty interesting because they had a good product, and then removed a bunch of features which turned it into a sucky awful product.

http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

Sure, that was the intention of the pun ;-)

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