AI guru Yoshua Bengio signs up as a strategic advisor to Microsoft
Yoshua Bengio, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers with nearly 70,000 citations on Google Scholar, has become a strategic advisor to Microsoft. Based at the University of Montreal, Bengio will help the tech giant as it aims to become the third leading player in AI, behind Facebook and Google. Though he is formally associated with Microsoft, Bengio told Wired that he still considers himself a neutral actor in the corporate development of AI and continues to advise other firms.  
Yoshua Bengio has never been one to take sides. As one of the three intellects who shaped the deep learning that now dominates artificial intelligence, he has been catapulted to stardom. It’s a field so new the people who can advance it fit into one room together, and everyone—from tech startups to multinational conglomerates and the department of defense—wants a share of their minds.

But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. “I want to remain a neutral agent,” he says as he sips rust-colored licorice water, which he pours from a carafe that acts as a weight for the mess of papers cluttering his desk.

Jessi Hempel is head of editorial at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

Like the nuclear scientists of the last century, Bengio understands that the tools he's invented are powerful beyond measure and must be cultivated with great forethought and widespread consideration. “We don’t want one or two companies, which I will not name, to be the only big players in town for AI,” he says, raising his eyebrows to indicate that we both know which companies he means. One eyebrow is in Menlo Park; the other is in Mountain View. “It’s not good for the community. It’s not good for people in general.”

That’s why Bengio has recently chosen to sign on with Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft. His bet is that the former kingdom of Windows alone has the capability to establish itself as AI’s third giant. It's a company that has the resources, the data, the talent, and—most critically—the vision and culture to not only realize the spoils of the science, but also push the field forward. In January, in a move noted throughout the industry, Bengio agreed to be a strategic advisor to the company. This gives Microsoft a direct line to one of AI’s top resources for ideas, talent, and direction. And it’s a strong sign that Microsoft actually has a shot at making the ruling AI duo into a trio.

The guy who signed Bengio, wooing him over many months with all the finesse of an agent to the star athletes, is a computer scientist with a shock of gray hair and wireframe glasses named Harry Shum. “He was just here actually, in this very room,” Shum tells me, with a brief smile that suggests he knows that an outsider might find it odd to be star struck by a tall Canadian with dramatic eyebrows and 69,616 citations in Google Scholar.

We’re seated on a gray couch in a sweeping conference room on the fifth floor of Building 34, just beyond the security guard who keeps watch over Microsoft’s executive suite. Shum, who is in charge of all of AI and research at Microsoft, has just finished a dress rehearsal for next week’s Build developers conference, and he wants to show me demos. I trail him down a hallway, half-skipping to keep up. There’s just so much happening! In one lab, the Skype team’s automatic translator app allows me to chat with a German speaker via text in realtime. In another, I watch an app that surveys a construction site for safety violations or unauthorized visitors, which it can detect through computer vision. In yet another, Cortana, the AI diva of the Microsoft empire, scans my inbox for promises I’ve made to people, and prompts me to fulfill them.