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How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft

Posted by samzenpus on from the doing-it-smarter dept.

snydeq writes Yesterday's announcement of Azure Machine Learning offers the latest sign of Microsoft's deep machine learning expertise — now available to developers everywhere, InfoWorld reports. "Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages. Now, with machine learning available on the Azure cloud, developers can build learning capabilities into their own applications: recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more. The idea of the new Azure offering is to democratize machine learning, so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm."

5 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Call me paraniod, but ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... this is just their latest way to get their hands on your data.

  2. Correlation and causation again by louic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I foresee a bright future where lots of correlations will be found. Without "a PhD" or someone who knows what they are doing ALL software is worthless.

    1. Re:Correlation and causation again by gruntkowski · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is so correct. I've tested the machine learning software on Azure. It is very nice and quite powerful. But without knowing what you are really doing, you probably get results which seem nice, but are in fact complete bogus. If you do not know what overfitting is for example, good luck using machine learning algorithms. If some manager starts using this, may god have mercy on us all...

  3. Re:Youpie I just wasted 5 years of my life.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Maybe you should waste another year of your life on spelling lessons.

  4. Re:How Bing learns by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with your statement is you make the assertion that Bing no longer sucks, which is false. Bing is still horrible.