Microsoft has acquired deep learning startup Maluuba in an effort to advance its AI capabilities.
Maluuba — a Montreal-based startup that impressed during TechCrunch’s 2012 San Francisco Startup Battlefield competition — uses natural language processing and machine learning to achieve a singular goal.
Microsoft will announce what it’s planning to do with Maluuba in the next few months, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s recently formed artificial intelligence and research group, wrote in a blog post. Shum said Maluuba’s expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help Microsoft advance its strategy to make AI accessible and valuable to everyone:consumers, businesses and developers.
Maluuba was founded in 2011 and is based in Montreal and Waterloo in Canada. Partners include Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), of which Bengio is the head. Recently, Bengio received a grant from Google as part of the formation of a Montreal AI research group.
