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Marketing, buy-in, monetizing Skype, and product placement: The field of AI is ridiculously hot. A Chatbot is the least complex AI to build, but it still qualifies as AI. Hence, if you want to join the hype, a chatbot is a reasonable start. With a few regular expressions and if-then rules you too can build Tay.ai (but only MS can get the press for it). Compare to Microsoft PopFly and Silverlight with rich media. [1] It's also possible that Google releases personal assistants for Google Business in the next few months, and MS picked up on that 6 months ago. Competition: Facebook is building "M", a personal assistant-style personal assistant. Apple has Siri. Google has Google Now. And MS has Cortana. Technology: Some (Weasel-word, but I don't want to list names) say that computer vision is now solved. Convnets can predict 1000-class problems with the same accuracy as humans. The deep learning field is now eating away at the fields of reinforcement learning, generative art, and NLP. Recent papers show that it is now possible to create a conversational bot without any hand-crafting of rules. Military/defense: Both the AI/ML industry and academics are in bed with the military complex. We did not study convnets, to aid the blind, no, we studied convnets, so we could detect terrorists at the border or in public transit. The people working on guided missile systems in the previous generation are now working on unmanned aerial drones. People were interested in fooling convnets, not for the hell of it, but because it is dangerous when a turret mistakes a tank for a puppy. For NLP: DARPA and IARPA want better defense and intelligence technology. The systems to suck up all these global communications are in place, but it still relies on old "dumb" tech, like keyword-matching. It is not able to detect sarcasm, 1337-speak, or code words. That is a big driver behind the attempt to evolve NLP: Terrorists do not need encryption, when they can talk about butchering goats and get lost in the noise, and no one is the wiser. The Turing-test will forever be a moving goal-post. Mimicking intelligence does not seem to be enough to call machines intelligent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly |