Ahead of its build conference, microsoft today released a slew of new machine learning products and tweaks to some of its existing services. These range from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with a number of new apis and other services in-between.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the core theme, here, though, is that microsoft is continuing its strategy of democratizing access to AI.

Ahead of the release, I sat down with microsoft’s eri boyd, the company’s corporate vice president of its AI platform, to discuss microsoft’s take on this space, where it competes heavily with the likes of google and AWS, as well as numerous, often more specialized startups.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom and to some degree, the actual machine learning technologies have become table stakes. Everybody now offers pre-trained models, open-source tools and the platforms to train, build and deploy models.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom if one company doesn’t have pre-trained models for some use cases that its competitors support, it’s only a matter of time before it will. It’s the auxiliary services and the overall developer experience, though, where companies like microsoft, with its long history of developing these tools, can differentiate themselves.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

“AI is really impacting the way the world does business,” boyd said. “we see 75% of commercial enterprises are doing more with AI in the next several years.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom it’s tripled in the last couple years, according to gartner. And so, we’re really seeing an explosion in the amount of work that’s coming from there.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom as people are driving this forward, as companies are driving this forward, developers are on the front lines, trying to figure out how to move their companies forward, how to build these models and how to build these applications, and help scale with all the changes that are moving through this.”

cognitive learning theory in the classroom

As companies start adopting machine learning, though, they are now also getting to a point where they have moved from a few tests to maybe running a hundred models in production.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom that comes with its own challenges. “they are trying to figure out how to manage the life cycle of these models,” he said. “how do I think of the operational cycle?Cognitive learning theory in the classroom how do I think about a new model that I’m ready to deploy? When is it ready to go?”

Only a few years ago, the industry started moving to a devops model for managing code.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom what microsoft essentially wants to move to is mlops for managing models. “it’s very similar to devops, but there’s some distinct differences in terms of how the tools operate,” boyd noted.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom “at microsoft, we’re really focusing on how do we solve these problems to make developers way more productive, using these enterprise tools to drive these changes that they need across their organization.” this means thinking about how to bring concepts like source control and continuous development to machine learning models, for example, and that will take new tools.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

It’s no surprise then that adding more mlops capabilities is a major part of today’s releases. The company is integrating some of these functions into azure devops, for example, that allows them to trigger release pipelines.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the company is also giving developers and data scientists tools for model version control, for example, to track and manage their assets and to share machine learning pipelines.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

These are very much tools for advanced machine learning practitioners, though. On the other side of the spectrum, microsoft also announced a number of automated machine learning tools, including one that essentially automates all of the processes, as well as a visual model builder, which grew out of the azure ML studio.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom as boyd told me, even companies like british petroleum and oregon’s deschutes brewery (try their black butte porter if you get a chance) now use these tools.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

Microsoft today also launched a number of new services in its cognitive services lineup, including a new personalization service, an API for recognizing handwriting and another one for transcribing conversations with multiple speakers.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the personalization service stands out here because it uses reinforcement learning, a different machine learning technique from most other cognitive services tools, and because it is far easier to implement than similar services.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom for business users, there’s also the form recognizer, which makes extracting data from forms easy.

What’s more interesting that the specific features, though, is that microsoft is shifting its emphasis here a little bit.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom “we’re moving away from some of the first-level problems of ‘here’s the table stakes, you have to have an AI platform,’ to much more sophisticated use cases around the operations of these algorithms, the simplification of them, new user experiences to really simplify how developers work and much richer cognitive services,” boyd explained.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom