Here's Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft Corporation's Latest AI Acquisition

The Montreal-based company is "one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding", according to Microsoft, and will help the tech giant pursue a monumental goal in AI, called artificial general intelligence (AGI). The idea behind AGI -- and Maluuba's main pursuit -- is to create "literate machines that can think, reason, and communicate like humans", Microsoft's executive vice president of artificial intelligence, Harry Shum, wrote in a blog post. The company is using natural language processing technology that helps machines understand what people are saying, what context they're asking it in, and what information they want in a response -- just as humans communicate.