Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba; AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio to have advisory role - The Official Microsoft Blog

Today is an exciting day for the advancement of AI at Microsoft. We have agreed to acquire Maluuba, a Montreal-based company with one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding. Maluuba's expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone -- consumers, businesses and developers. We've recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next -- machine reading and writing. Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans -- a vision exactly in line with ours.