Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence

But the rivals can agree on some things--like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology. Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise of AI. Afterward, the pair talked with Technology Review's IT editor, Tom Simonite, about what AI can do today, and what they think it'll be capable of tomorrow. Artificial intelligence is a complex subject, and some answers have been edited for brevity. Technology Review: You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech.