Every application will have some
degree of AI.
And some applications
will be dominantly AI, some applications
will be more program.
[Music]
I'm happy to welcome Joseph Siroush from
Microsoft you are the corporate vice
president and CTO of AI.
Thank you so
much for joining us in our AI summit
interview series.
Really happy to have
you.
Pleasure to be here Bill.
Microsoft has really seems like they've put
a slogan around their AI space which is
"AI for good".
Can you tell me a little bit
about that?
What's what's that all about?
Microsoft's slogan overall is
empowerment.
We believe in empowering
others because people build on the
platform's we create and build amazing
things on top of them.
Right?
So we
believe AI can actually be a very
powerful force in this economy for good
and let me give you a few examples.
Please.
Today, I spoke about a prosthetic
arm that can see.
Oh neat.
Okay I mean so the
arm has a camera and the camera, when you
bring it close to an object, it
recognizes what that object is and then
a cloud AI service tells what fingers to
move to grasp that precisely.
Right?
I
love it.
That's very powerful and the
magic by the way is in the cloud AI
service.
There it detects the object,
understands what that object is,
calculates what the right grip should be,
and executes them.
And then it's
customizable.
you can train it and set it
up the way you want.
You can change it to
different environments.
Other people give
could give you skills.
Now imagine, if you
could 3D print cheap prosthetics.
You
could connect it to a cloud service so
that cloud service could control the
behavior of it.
Right.
You don't have to
painfully interface it with your body.
I
mean, today's prosthetics just getting
that to work with you and you training
your own muscles etcetera to operate that.
Very difficult.
Very painful.
You took all
of that away and now to a cloud layer
service you say "oh I want to grasp that
object".
It recognizes an object and you
grasp it.
And you can take that picture to
almost every kind of prosthetic device.
Not just an arm.
Right.
You know.
It could
be anything that is assisting you.
So how
does Microsoft do this?
So you sponsor
this competition to undergraduates,
build this system for, you know, 100 bucks.
Where do you go from there?
We then show
how the platform can be used by all of
these kinds of other device makers.
And
so now, it's really up to the end device
makers and the application makers and
software makers to leverage that and
build on top of it.
Okay.
So we are
creating that enabling technology that
opens up all of these possibilities.
How
big is the team that you have that's
that's under you and working on all these
exciting things?
Yes so Microsoft has
thousands of people working on AI and
machine learning and then even more
thousands of engineers building these
platforms.
So it's actually now a company-
wide effort and AI in many ways is
becoming part of software.
Right?
It's not -
now it's almost as though you shouldn't
consider it as a separate thing at all.
There's programmed intelligence from
traditional software and there is
artificial intelligence which learns
from data and both coexist and every
software application will be an AI
application as well.
So, if we look, you
know, two years into the future, five
years into the future finish this
sentence - Microsoft is a blank company.
Microsoft is a cloud and AI company.
Cloud and AI company.
Yeah.
And every every
application will have some degree of AI.
So one of the things that I think is
difficult about about AI is, if it's
done right, it's completely intangible
and and you know.
It's a ghost in the
background.
Right?
How do you
communicate that to both your clients
and also help them communicate to their
customers this idea that when done
correctly it's invisible.
Right.
You
know, by the way that's true about
software as well.
Now you know you and I
are having a conversation.
Even though
it's with microphones and things, there's
tremendous amount of software recording
the video, processing the video code
recording the video all sorts of things.
Right.
You are absolutely right that
powerful technologies like this just
disappear into the background.
There is a
famous quote by Mark Weisner about this.
It's like we don't see electricity.
There's no - nothing's parking in front of
our eyes.
Right?
The same way with AI that all
of these powerful technologies just go
into our systems.
The systems around us
become adaptable, responsive learning far
more tailor to our preferences and able
to provide magical interactions.
So I
like the way that Microsoft has
placed this focus on AI for good.
How
hard is it to be a market leader, a huge
company like Microsoft in a space where
there are so many up-and-coming
companies that are trying to do very
different things?
You have to really set
the standard.
I mean is that a hard
position to be in or is it the best
position to be in?
We have always been in
that position.
And, what we are able to do
is be a really good partner and
Microsoft partners with everyone.
Like,
for example, we have a great partnership
with Cognizant.
We have an amazing
partnership where we bring our platform
technology and Cognizant brings a lot of
domain expertise and a ability to really
implement these solutions in these
verticals together.
And that's an amazing
marriage made in heaven.
And the
thing about Microsoft is, in some ways, we
are just about empowering everybody else.
So it's a non-threatening position to
be in.
I mean certain other companies
that have clouds etcetera- they are you
know very strong in certain businesses
and encroaching into one business after
another in many ways that are
threatening and instead we are about
being a platform that others build on.