Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence

Peter Norvig and Eric Horvitz agree that AI is a key to the future of research. Bart Nagel; Microsoft

Google and Microsoft don't share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas just as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. However the rivals can agree on some things—like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of innovation.

Peter Norvig, Google's director of innovation, and Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Technology, recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise of AI. Afterward, the pair talked with Research Review's IT Editor, Tom Simonite, about what AI can do today, and what they think it'll be capable of tomorrow.

Technology Review: You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech. What about the areas we want AI to help where there isn't lots of data to learn from?

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