Yet another Silicon Valley biggie in tech has bought an AI start-up. That’s right, this time it’s Microsoft. The company has acquired Canadian natural deep learning start-up Maluuba for an undisclosed sum.
Maluuba’s expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone — consumers, businesses and developers.
the company said in it’s blog post.
Yoshua Bengio, from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, has served as a special advisor to Maluuba, and will stay on in that role with Microsoft. Needless to speak, Bengio is a world-renowned expert in deep learning and this newest addition will go a long way in providing that extra edge to Microsoft with respect to AI.
Bengio is one of the foremost authorities on AI and also founded a startup, Element AI, in which Microsoft Ventures took a stake late last year.
Microsoft has been rapidly trying to gain a foothold in the AI space. The company has acquired Genee, SwiftKey, VoloMetrix, FieldOne, Equivio and Aorato within the last thirty months. However, it is not alone. Just days ago, Amazon secretly acquired AI security start-up Harvest.ai. Similarly, Apple had acquired a Hyderabad based AI firm Tuplejump in September last year.
These acquisitions are tech giants acquiring technologies through buying startups and then integrating and suing them in their own systems, rather than going to the trouble of developing them from scratch in-house.
