Since Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the company has doubled down on its efforts to become a leader in artificial intelligence. As with most tech giants, Microsoft uses the technology to power its own products, like the Office 365 productivity suite and the workplace chat app Teams. But it also has a thriving business reselling its AI capabilities to other developers, through its Azure Cognitive Services platform, where it sells core algorithms for natural language processing and image recognition. Artificial intelligence is an arena where Microsoft competes fiercely with Amazon and Google, both in its own products and sold as cloud services. More advanced algorithms, or their more creative application, can brand one company's product as a category leader and the rest as followers.

Socher also teaches computer science at Stanford, where he got his PhD with a focus on AI and deep learning. "I think the future is a fully immersive …