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How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft
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."
Ate or Aid?
"recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more."
I'll never get a job again if they use that in interviews.
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...
The problem with your statement is you make the assertion that Bing no longer sucks, which is false. Bing is still horrible.
Bob set machine learning back a century.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
SharePoint will do that.
For that matter you can run the entire Azure suite in your private location: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
Let me be clear: what applies to Azure as a foreigner applies also to Amazon/AWS, Google, Rackspace, IBM/SoftLayer, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, PeerOne or any other US-based company (even if they run the service in Europe for example).
But I noticed there are others in the world, for example on the OpenStack Marketplace:
http://www.openstack.org/marke...
New things are always on the horizon
Although the above was just a joke, I actually clicked on the link after I submitted it, and it turns out to be an old page from 2009. It provides the follows searches which it says "just don't work" on Bing (in 2009):
“Was Einstein married?”
“What did Benjamin Franklin invent?”
“What is the top selling album of all time?”
I did a quick comparison of those three between Bing and Google, and the results seemed pretty comparable. In fact, I thought Bing did a little better on the first two, and Google did a little better on the last one - primarily because it provided a nice blurb from Wikipedia in the results.
So, although I think we can all agree that Bing was "horrible" in the past, it's come a long ways. It's not like in the old days when Google was clearly the best - I think you could use any of the major search engines now and do just fine.