Microsoft's latest AI buy will help it battle Amazon and Google - analyst

Microsoft's Maluuba acquisition to be 'major boost' to its AI capabilities, according to TechMarketView

Microsoft has acquired Canadian AI specialist Maluuba, in a move analyst TechMarketView claims will be a "major boost", and will help it take on Amazon and Google in bringing machine learning to the enterprise.

In a blog post over the weekend, Microsoft announced that it had bought Montreal-based firm Maluuba, which it claims is "one of the world's most impressive deep-learning research labs for natural language understanding".

"Maluuba's expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratise AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone - consumers, businesses and developers," said Harry Shum, executive vice president for Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group.

"We've recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep-learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next: machine reading and writing."

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Shum added that Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman, who founded the firm in 2011, will become part of its Artificial Intelligence and Research organisation.

TechMarketView analyst Angela Eager described Microsoft's move as "quite strategic".

"In a forward-looking environment, Maluuba is even more forward looking with its ambition to create the holy grail of artificial intelligence: artificial general intelligence, through 'literate machines that could think, reason and communicate like humans'. Its first steps have been to focus on machine reading comprehension, understanding dialogue, and general (human) intelligence capabilities such as memory, common-sense reasoning, and information-seeking behaviour. The team knew it needed substantial resources to take things further, which is where Microsoft comes in.

"As for Microsoft, it gets a major boost to its AI capabilities, research efforts - and expertise.

"Given the expertise and development direction, the Maluuba acquisition is quite strategic for Microsoft and will help Microsoft in its race with Amazon and Google to bring machine intelligence to the enterprise market."