AI Microsoft News | Latest AI Developments at Microsoft

AI learns how to play Minecraft by watching videos

Open AI has trained a neural network to play Minecraft by Video PreTraining (VPT) on a massive unlabeled video dataset of human Minecraft play, while using just a small amount of labeled contractor data.

With a bit of fine-tuning, the AI research and deployment company is confident that its model can learn to craft diamond tools, a task that usually takes proficient humans over 20 minutes (24,000 actions). Its model uses the native human interface of keypresses and mouse...

29 June 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

Nuance partners with The Academy to launch The AI Collaborative

Nuance has partnered with The Health Management Academy (The Academy) to launch The AI Collaborative, an industry group focused on advancing healthcare using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Nuance became a household name for creating the speech engine recognition engine behind Siri. In recent years, the company has put a strong focus on AI solutions for healthcare and is now a full-service partner of 77 percent of US hospitals and is trusted by over 500,000...

13 May 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

AI system inspects astronauts’ gloves for damage in real-time

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HSE) are working with NASA scientists to develop an AI system for inspecting astronauts’ gloves.

Space is an unforgiving environment and equipment failures can be catastrophic. Gloves are particularly prone to wear and tear as they’re used for just about everything, including repairing equipment and installing new equipment.

Currently, astronauts will send back images of their gloves to Earth to be manually examined by NASA...

5 April 2022 | Applications

Microsoft acquires Nuance to usher in ‘new era of outcomes-based AI’

Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Siri backend creator Nuance in a bumper deal that it says will usher in a “new era of outcomes-based AI”.

“Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance’s best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud + AI Group at Microsoft.

“This powerful...

8 March 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

EU clears $19.7B Microsoft-Nuance deal without any small print

The EU has concluded Microsoft’s $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance doesn’t pose competition concerns.

Nuance gained renown for originally creating the backend of that little old virtual assistant called Siri (you might have heard of it?)

The company has since continued to focus on building its speech recognition capabilities and has a number of solutions which span particular industries such as healthcare to general omni-channel customer experience...

22 December 2021 | Artificial Intelligence

Nvidia and Microsoft develop 530 billion parameter AI model, but it still suffers from bias

Nvidia and Microsoft have developed an incredible 530 billion parameter AI model, but it still suffers from bias.

The pair claim their Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLG) model is the "most powerful monolithic transformer language model trained to date".

For comparison, OpenAI’s much-lauded GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters.

The duo trained their impressive model on 15 datasets with a total of 339 billion tokens. Various sampling weights...

12 October 2021 | Companies

Experts debate whether GitHub’s latest AI tool violates copyright law

GitHub’s impressive new code-assisting AI tool called Copilot is receiving both praise and criticism.

Copilot draws context from the code that a developer is working on and can suggest entire lines or functions. The system, from OpenAI, claims to be “significantly more capable than GPT-3” in generating code and can help even veteran programmers to discover new APIs or ways to solve problems.

Critics claim the system is using copyrighted code that GitHub then plans...

6 July 2021 | Companies

Researchers from Microsoft and global leading universities study the ‘offensive AI’ threat

A group of researchers from Microsoft and seven global leading universities have conducted an industry study into the threat offensive AI is posing to organisations.

AIs are beneficial tools but are indiscriminate in also providing assistance to individuals and groups that set out to cause harm.

The researchers’ study into offensive AI used both existing research into the subject in addition to responses from organisations including Airbus, Huawei, and...

2 July 2021 | Companies

Microsoft considers acquiring Siri creator Nuance for $16 billion

Microsoft is considering acquiring Siri creator Nuance for $16 billion in a deal that’s expected to be announced imminently.

Silicon Valley darling Nuance is one of the world’s most recognisable AI companies for the creation of Siri, the voice assistant that would later go on to become Apple’s first-party solution.

Nuance now focuses its efforts predominantly on enterprise communications, particularly in the healthcare space which has seen increased interest amid...