Artificial Intelligence has been the game changer and favorite recipe for the tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. It is gaining the pace with the passage of time and companies are showing a keen interest in adopting the technology.
Microsoft gained massive attention after acquiring GitHub but has not yet faded with time. It has come up with another big announcement, gaining the attention of technology geeks, influencers, and tech giants. It has agreed to acquire Bonsai, a leading San Francisco based startup founded in 2014 by Microsoft Engineers Mark Hammond and Keen Browne. It helped companies to deploy AI capabilities and machine learning into their existing infrastructure.
Bonsai Technology helps customers in industries like automotive, energy and manufacturing to build AI into their intelligent systems and operations. The automated platform allows experts to train autonomous system, despite AI knowledge.
Bonsai does for AI what database do for data. The company mainly stresses on simplifying the training phase of AI projects that is a time-consuming process. It allows industrial experts to state the concepts they want an AI to master in a proprietary programming language known as Inkling. From that point, the software automatically picks the appropriate reinforcement-learning algorithm to carry out the training process.
Bonsai’s 42 employees will be in the team of AI and research group of Microsoft, the center of major technological shift inside the company.
According to an executive at Microsoft’s AI and research group, Gurdeep Pall wrote in a blog post, “To realize this vision of making AI more accessible and valuable for all, we have to remove the barriers to development, empowering every developer, regardless of machine learning expertise, to be an AI developer.”
Bonsai has made marvelous progress here and Microsoft remains committed to continuing the work. Microsoft had an investor in Bonsai via its M12 venture capital arm. Bonsai raised $13.6 million to data while other investors include NEA, Samsung NEXT, ABB Technology Ventures and Siemens. The company has not voiced its roadmap regarding features and existing customers. Terms of deals were not revealed yet.
The acquisition by Microsoft is the biggest milestone after the GitHub acquisition. The aim of the investment is to double down the existing AI investments. Earlier this year, the company had gone through an internal reorganization that shifted its AI offerings and Azure under the umbrella of a new division known as Cloud + AI platform. In the past few quarters, AI + research group has increased its workers from 5,000 to 8,000.
