Microsoft alliance with Facebook signals shift in AI approach

Microsoft has now developed an open source tool for crafting the Artificial Intelligence models. But in the recent months, the company has changed the course, which is now opting to work much more closely with the social media giant Facebook and also contribute to the development of the Facebook own flavor of the free Artificial Intelligence software.

Microsoft has not made a big deal as of now about the change. But it also reflects a willingness to back the software which comes from the other major technology companies, instead of focusing only on its own set of platforms.

Google, which is the largest search engine has the most popular open source Artificial Intelligence software, TensorFlow which available already in 2015. Microsoft put it cognitive Toolkit or CNTK software on the Github and gave it a more permissive open source license in the early 2016, and Facebook revealed PyTorch its answer to TensorFlow in 2016.

But the direction is clear. “The momentum of community, really, is around PyTorch and TensorFlow, and so that’s where we’re throwing the bulk of our emphasis,” said Eric Boyd, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI platform. “Having community adoption is hugely important.”

The Microsoft system has strengthens particularly for building the speech recognition systems but the PyTorch has gained adoption quickly and has also gave some of the interesting technical features of its own, Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott revealed in a report.

In Sept. 2017 Facebook and Microsoft together introduced ONNX, a piece of open-source software for exporting models trained with one AI software framework, like Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, so that they can be used to make predictions with other frameworks, like Facebook’s PyTorch.

“We have to be able to actually contribute back to the community,” he said.