BigDataFr recommends: Microsoft Thinks Machines Can Learn to Converse by Making Chat a Game

[…] Microsoft is buying a deep learning startup based in Montreal, a global hub for deep learning research. But two years ago, this startup wasn’t based in Montreal, and it had nothing to do with deep learning. Which just goes to show: striking it big in the world of tech is all about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea.

Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman founded Maluuba in 2011 as students at the University of Waterloo, about 400 miles from Montreal. The company’s name is an insider’s nod to one of their undergraduate computer science classes. From an office in Waterloo, they started building something like Siri, the digital assistant that would soon arrive on the iPhone, and they built it in much the same way Apple built the original, using techniques that had driven the development of conversational computing for years—techniques that require extremely slow and meticulous work, where engineers construct AI one tiny piece at a time. But as they toiled away in Waterloo, companies like Google and Facebook embraced deep neural networks, and this technology reinvented everything from image recognition to machine translations, rapidly learning these tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. […]

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By Cade Metz
Source: https://www.wired.com