Xbox Series X may have one additional advantage over Sony's PlayStation 5 console: machine learning. In an interview with WCCFTech, Quantic Dreams CEO David Cage revealed that the design of Microsoft's Xbox Series X gives it the advantage in machine learning compared to the PlayStation 5. Cage revealed that while the slightly better CPU and beefier GPU of the Xbox Series X gives Microsoft a slight edge over PS5, it's really the machine learning capabilities of the Xbox console that may help it succeed against PlayStation's faster SSD. "The shader cores of the Xbox are also more suitable to machine learning, which could be an advantage if Microsoft succeeds in implementing an equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS," Cage explained. However, the PlayStation-focused developer also explained that Sony has consistently punched up to deliver great looking games on not-so-powerful hardware in the past. "I think that the pure analysis of the hardware shows an advantage for Microsoft, but experience tells us that hardware is only part of the equation: Sony showed in the past that their consoles could deliver the best-looking games because their architecture and software were usually very consistent and efficient."

GPT is short for Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT), a language model written by Alec Radford and published in 2018 by OpenAI, Elon Musks's artificial intelligence research laboratory. It uses a generative model of language (where two neural networks perfect each other by competition) and is able to acquire knowledge of the world and process long-range dependencies by pre-training on diverse sets of written material with long stretches of contiguous text. GPT-2 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 2) was announced in February 2019 and is an unsupervised transformer language model trained on 8 million documents for a total of 40 GB of text from articles shared via Reddit submissions. Elon Musk was famously reluctant to release it as he was concerned it could be used to spam social networks with fake news. In May 2020 OpenAI announced GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), a model which contains two orders of magnitude more parameters than GPT-2 (175 billion vs 1.5 billion parameters) and which offers a dramatic improvement over GPT-2.

During Build 2019 last year, Microsoft first announced the Rewrite feature in Microsoft Word. Rewrite feature allowed users to quickly find alternative expressions for phrases in their writing. Recently, Microsoft updated this Rewrite feature to make it even more useful. In addition to phrasal suggestions, Rewrite feature now offers sentence-level writing suggestions. This feature was made possible by Microsoft's cutting-edge, neural-network, machine learning models, which are trained on millions of sentences.

Samsung has not had the best of luck breaking into the smart digital assistant market, with the very capable Bixby not very well regarded. Samsung is however looking to have another go, and has been teasing a new AI product called NEON with tweets and Instagram posts. Have you ever met an'ARTIFICIAL'?#NEON While the teasers and NEON.Life website do not give much away, the project comes from Samsung STAR Labs, who's remit is "to secure cutting-edge AI core technologies and platforms--human-level AI with the ability to speak, recognize, and think--to provide new AI-driven experiences and value to its customers." The same team also contributes to Bixby, suggesting NEON is an offshoot of that work.

Public smoking has been an issue for countries around the world. However, the biggest safety issue countries face right now is smoking on or near a gas station. This is because the gasoline usually has a low auto-ignition point which means a single cigarette can cause an explosion. This is a huge problem for gasoline companies ...

At their 2018 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Microsoft showed off a robot which achieved the holy grail of computing – being able to retrieve a beer from the fridge when asked to. Based on a combination of local and remote processing, the robot is able to simulate actions in virtual reality to make sure they are safe before actually performing them, allowing it to safely complete complex tasks. Ostensibly to help receptionists with their daily tasks (such as apparently getting drinks from the fridge) the robot will also be able to sense when the receptionist needs help, speak to and answer questions from visitors and offer the receptionist the benefit of its deep database of knowledge, in other words, more or less Clippy come to life. See the robot in action in Microsoft's video below.

At Connect() developer event last year, Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Databricks service for highest-performance streaming analytics projects. Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform that delivers one-click setup, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the general availability of this service. At the Spark AI Summit yesterday, Microsoft announced a couple of new enhancements to Azure Databricks. First, they are adding support for GPU enabled VMs.

During the Windows Developer Day event yesterday, Microsoft revealed the Windows AI platform which will allow developers to build intelligent apps on Windows 10. One of the highlighted features of WinML APIs is the support for pre-trained machine learning models. Windows ML will efficiently use hardware for any given artificial intelligence (AI) workload and intelligently distributes work across multiple hardware types including CPU, GPU and Intel's Vision Processing Units (VPU). The Intel VPU is a purpose-built chip for accelerating AI workloads on client devices. Myriad X is world's first system-on-chip (SOC) shipping with a dedicated Neural Compute Engine for accelerating deep learning inferences at the edge.

During Microsoft's earnings call earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Cortana digital assistant has its own strength when compared to other assistants like Alexa as Cortana has a lot of unique information sources to draw from, including Windows 10, Office 365, Xbox and more. It's good to to see Satya's defending for Cortana, but I would like to see his words in action. The rate at which Cortana is gaining capabilities is nowhere near to Alexa or Google Assistant. Similar to how Windows Phone was never able to catch up with 3rd apps ecosystem, Cortana will never be able to catch up with Alexa's 3rd party skills ecosystem. According my sources inside Microsoft, Microsoft is not even considering Cortana as a as true competitor to Alexa.

Microsoft started its research presence in Montreal a year ago, when it acquired the deep learning startup Maluuba. Microsoft today confirmed its plans to significantly expand its Montreal research lab. They are planning to double the size of lab within the next two years, to as many as 75 technical experts. In addition, Microsoft has hired a renowned AI expert, Geoffrey Gordon as the Montreal research lab's new research director. Jennifer Chayes, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research New England, New York City and Montreal said that Montreal is really one of the most exciting places in AI right now and Geoffrey Gordon was an obvious choice because of his interest in both the foundational AI research that addresses fundamental AI challenges and the applied work that can quickly find its way into mainstream use.