Ignite 2016: Microsoft AI Tech Promises to Touch Consumers, Enterprises with Hyperscale Performance

"We're not pursuing [artificial intelligence] AI to beat humans at games; we are pursuing AI so we can empower every person and every institution" with the tools of AI. So began Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's afternoon keynote at Ignite 2016.

Nadella went on to describe why this lofty goal is necessary, and how Microsoft is achieving it. He also described how Microsoft has stealthily souped-up its global cloud infrastructure, with a ten-fold boost in compute capacity. (More on that below.)

AI an historic "inflection point"

Nadella described AI as the third of three inflection points that democratized intelligence, the first being the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1400s when perhaps 30,000 books in the world burg...

read more