Curiously speaking: Why Microsoft's buy out of Maluuba should put other 'AI' startups in check

The term "artificial intelligence" was beaten to semantic death in 2016. The term has been used and abused before, but perhaps never like it was during a year of self-driving cars and home assistants, anyone and everyone is trying to associate the "AI" acronym with their startup like it were the 1991 marketing blitz for Terminator 2. From that perspective, one might be quick to forgive anyone who dismissed the latest acquisition by Microsoft of Maluuba. Based in Montreal, University of Waterloo graduates Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman founded the company in 2010. Maluuba is currently focused on applying deep learning and "reinforcement learning" to language comprehension by machines. To that end, they have published several research papers though, haven't publicly released a product.