Microsoft announced on Friday their acquisition of an artificial intelligence startup, Maluuba.
Microsoft boasts in an announcement posted on their website that Maluuba is a “deep learning research” laboratory company with technology that can understand “natural language”.
Microsoft reveals in a press release that the Maluuba specializes in artificial intelligence that has the ability to learn and make decisions. In addition, Microsoft explains that they are going to “democratize” artificial intelligence by making it more accessible to Microsoft users.
“Maluuba’s vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans — a vision exactly in line with ours,” Harry Shum, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of their Artificial Intelligence Group, explained in a statement. “Maluuba’s impressive team is addressing some of the fundamental problems in language understanding by modeling some of the innate capabilities of the human brain, from memory and common sense reasoning to curiosity and decision making.”
Microsoft also explains that they will be using their Maluuba’s machine to provide additional benefits for a wide range of applications ranging from organizing information to answering questions using an organization’s documents, emails and other personal details.
“We believe that together, we can achieve greater scale for Maluuba’s groundbreaking work and accelerate our ability to develop software so computers can read, write and converse naturally,” Shum added.
More and more tech companies are investing in artificial intelligence. Last July, research firm CB Insights discovered more than $1 billion dollars was invested into Artificial Intelligence companies in 2015. Then, last month Apple released their first AI paper and just last week, Wikileaks revealed their plan to use AI software to track verified Twitter accounts. Not to mention, IBM’s Watson is now working with genomics companies and oncologists to develop individualized treatment options for cancer patients.