For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl, according to three employees involved in it.
AI groups inside rivals such as Google appeared to generate demonstrably more value by comparison, according to these Microsoft employees and other researchers. A group of Microsoft AI researchers told CEO Satya Nadella last year that rivals including Google and Apple were ahead of them when it came to using certain types of AI in major products such as voice assistants, one of these people said. And Nadella has consistently voiced concerns to colleagues that the company wasn’t turning its AI research into marketable services fast enough, said a person with direct knowledge.
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