Slipstreaming close to Google, Microsoft has now launched an initiative which it hopes will enable humans and artificial intelligence to complement each other more effectively.
In an event in London on Wednesday, Microsoft had announced that it will be bringing together a new team of 100 engineers and researchers under the umbrella of Microsoft Research AI at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The software giant has stated that this initiative is an effort to break down barriers between people who have been working across separate areas of AI. Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Eric Horvitz has stated that the initiative will put Microsoft on “the path to understanding the mysteries of human intellect.”
One of the bigger focuses of this initiative is to assist human-AI collaboration. “When computers can speak [and] balance the smarts of IQ with the empathy of EQ, then every human will be able to collaborate with computers,” explained Harry Shum, executive Vice President of Microsoft’s AI and Research Group. The move has echoed a similar announcement earlier this week from Google, which launched its new People + AI Research (PAIR) program to try and improve the way humans and machines work with each other.
Microsoft says that it wants to focus on how AI can help fill the gaps in human intelligence, rather than just simply recreating it in silico. So this means, the new team aims to lean on cognitive psychology in order to identify holes in human intellect — such as our propensity to forget things or be easily distracted — and utilise them to create AIs which will then compliment those blind spots.
The company is also working towards developing new ways to test its machine-learning tools so that they do not go haywire in the real world even if they have worked in the lab.
