Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
To put this in perspective, 5000 people at $200k per year (which is conservative if you include benefits, etc.) is 1 billion dollars in comp per year.<p>So OpenAI is spending a billion dollars over the next several years.<p>Microsoft is spending a billion dollars per year.<p>Google, etc. do the math.<p>There's literally billions of dollars now being spent on moving deep learning forward. Pretty amazing when I think back to 2011 and there were machine learning conferences where literally no one I spoke to had heard of deep learning.<p>People worrying about a second AI winter are like the people that have been worrying about an "internet bubble" since 2004. It's fine to be worried, there will be bubbles, but this time it's different and there are many reasons for that. There is no "internet industry" anymore; it's become more segmented and just plain <i>bigger</i>. Similarly, there will be no "AI industry"; it will branch out, and there are more potential applications of "understanding data and automating decisions" than there were in the 80s.<p>> something that they are branding AI - I might wait and see how much of it is on real AI - what ever that is.<p>Yeah, I wouldn't get hung up on that, they're calling it AI because that's easier to explain to reporters than deep learning. The difference is deep learning techniques are already being used in released products and companies are looking to do more of that, so there is a very real definition and set of goals associated with what these groups are doing, it's not just, "hey everyone, let's make an ai!"