Microsoft in global AI push to make smarter business, consumer applications
Software giant’s initiative augurs well for developers on the mainland, which is projected to have the world’s fastest-growing AI apps market
More than a year since it made a strategic pivot to artificial intelligence, Microsoft Corp has stepped up efforts to empower tens of thousands of software developers around the world to create smarter applications for businesses and consumers.
That could enable Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, to remain more relevant than ever in mainland China, where the market for AI applications is predicted to become the fastest-growing globally.
“There are plenty of opportunities,” Harry Shum Heung-yeung, the executive vice-president of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and research group, said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post. “Our approach is very simple: we are here to democratise access to AI.”
Shum, who was one of the founding members of Beijing-based Microsoft Research Asia in 1998, currently leads a global team of roughly 7,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company’s AI initiatives.
After 60 years of development, AI has entered a new phase of accelerated growth, driven by major advances in computing power, the development of powerful machine learning and deep learning algorithms, and an explosion in data that can be fed into these algorithms, according to consulting firm McKinsey.
Machine learning is a type of AI focused on computer programmes that have the ability to learn when exposed to new data, while deep learning is an AI function that imitates how the human brain works in processing data to make decisions.
