Dan'l Lewin describes how cloud computing and tiny sensors are converging to transform technology. He shows how Skype's real-time translation now supports dozens of languages, and how the same AI tools that power intelligent assistants can amplify societal biases, as the controversial Tay chatbot demonstrated.
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So all of this points to something that Harry Shum, who runs our research organization, used to run our development in China, and then he ran our Bing search business as well. He's a terrific guy, born and raised in China, but sort of birthed his business career in Silicon Valley, started several companies and sold them, worked at Silicon Graphics and that kind of thing. He's a really interesting character. And he really calls it the invisible revolution, which is that, as I pointed out, this notion of absorbing the capability of the cloud, big machines in the sky, with little machines everywhere. The phone is a little, little machine, but we're really talking about sensors and the ability to instrument things down to teeny little plastic sensors that don't require power 'cause they suck it from the air. They take energy, these things exist as you know, I'm sure. But the idea of having an environment within which this revolution occurs, and there are some very visible surface-level examples. We love Skype. How many people know that Skype is owned by Microsoft? Okay, how many people know that it was DFJ that financed Skype, that we bought it from? There you go. So I mean, we have this great rapport with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who build things that when they grow up. At times they may be part of a larger play, if you will, because of the capital required to invest in what I would call this very future-oriented notion of the invisible revolution, right? So you've got your Skype translator, and I don't remember the stats, so I'll take a peek over here, but on the order of— oh, I don't remember the numbers. It's— Right now, 7 languages. And we're dealing— IM translation in 50 languages at the moment, right? So there's, you know, we've got these real-time capabilities now where you can start to open up your communications channels cross-border, cross-cultural barriers beyond sort of, you know, if you will, technical borders where, you know, nation-states care about rules and laws and things like that. But it's a very, very interesting thing when you start to think about how technology can augment really, in a really powerful way and break down walls and barriers, which frankly are where a lot of the bad politics occur in the world, where people are— I think, if you will, your generation, if I can grossly generalize your rough ages, oftentimes when I've traveled around the world and done a lot of work with entrepreneurs, I've been in I don't know how many countries. 100. Probably 60 or more in the last 10 or 15 years. Frankly, I spent 3 days in Syria 6 months before this whole thing blew up in Syria. And so I was— I mean, because we were really working with the universities, the US State Department sanctioned a business visit. It's the first time it happened in 7 years, really trying to use technology. And it was the transport of the telecommunications infrastructure and this level of software which motivated the State Department to sanction this formal business trip the first time in 7 years. to go and meet with the regime, if you will, that was from a political perspective not, if you will, sanctioned by the United States. But the goal was technology was gonna be the thing that was gonna break down the barriers. And that was the belief and the hope. And we had the Arab Spring. And again, no political commentary intended. But the world— technology can bring things together. And so it's the likes of a Skype translator or the ability to have an intelligent assistant like Cortana. in our case, and Apple's got their Siri, etc. But the idea here of having a set of technologies that are responsive to the level of querying that you might want to just pose in real time, and that's a fascinating and moving capability that will be generally programmable and generally available to the likes of entrepreneurs around the world. So most of the big companies, us included, lead with building first-party services, but then the intent is to open them up, because that's what lifts up everyone's opportunity. So again, you can start to think about your business considerations, leveraging all the plumbing that the likes of a big company like ours has built in our Azure cloud, running Linux servers. How many people knew that? We're running all the open source servers, we use all the open source protocols, we've open sourced all of our development tools. They're all out there, you can use them all for free, it's all the standard stuff. So any of the old notions that you may have had about the way Microsoft behaves about quote unquote closed source or packaged software, it's all gone. And so all that has changed radically in the last 2 years. And so parts are parts. You can use infrastructure, you can use servers, storage, plumbing, whatever you like, and then apply that and then leverage these kinds of services, whatever you want to build. So again, everybody is doing the same thing, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. They're all— I mean, Apple is a little different, a little more of a closed system, but Personal opinion, but they do a little less with the developer community other than the app stores at the moment anyway. So we'll see how that plays out in the sort of the broad future. So the last thing I would say actually about that before I go on to that is people have been following this bot stuff and our little Tay experiment and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's a fascinating phenomenon, right, where you start to think about these intelligent systems and these robots and And then how they start to reflect the inputs, you know, it's fascinating. You know, how many people have been paying attention to the U.S. presidential election stuff? For better or worse, I actually lead the team that's doing the technology engagement for both sides of the aisle in the U.S., so I'm deeply involved in this stuff. And it's just a sad state of affairs, unfortunately, to watch the reflection of American society surface, or at least a small fraction of it, surface within 24 hours. And as these kind of benign robots ended up out there, we've been running that same service in China for 2 years and nothing has happened of that ilk. So again, every society is different and the way the technology will be used will have its good times and its bad times for sure. But it's particularly exciting. Thank you.
