Microsoft today announced it had acquired Maluuba, a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In a Microsoft blog post, Harry Shum, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s AI and Research Group said, “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.”
The Montreal-based company primarily studies and develops reasoning, decision-making, and communication in machines. Per a company post, Maluuba hopes to create literate machines “that model the intelligence and decision-making capabilities of the human brain.”
The post continues, “Microsoft is an excellent match for our company. Their ambitious vision of democratizing AI to empower every person and every organization on the planet fundamentally aligns with how we see our technology being used.”
Shum additionally stated that deep learning expert and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, Yoshua Bengio, will advise Microsoft during the transition. The Maluuba release notes that Bengio has been an “invaluable” part of its research process.
Agencies/Canadajournal
Canada Journal – News of the World Articles and videos to bring you the biggest Canadian news stories from across the country every day
