Building A.I. That Can Build A.I.

The world's largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn't going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work. The industry is not willing to wait. Companies are developing all sorts of tools that will make it easier for any operation to build its own A.I. software, including things like image and speech recognition services and online chatbots. "We are following the same path that computer science has followed with every new type of technology," said Joseph Sirosh, a vice president at Microsoft, which recently unveiled a tool to help coders build deep neural networks, a type of computer algorithm that is driving much of the recent progress in the A.I. field.