Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Microsoft Backs CrowdFlower For Human, AI Trainers

Microsoft has made an investment in a startup, Crowdflower, which uses human beings to help better train their artificial intelligence algorithms. Crowdflower said it raised $10M in a funding round today, which came from Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Microsoft. Crowdflower crowdsources real humans to help shape the input into machine learning algorithms, which require a certain amount of "training" to behave properly and do what they were designed to do. Microsoft's own experimental AI bot, Tay Chatbot, was an unfortunate example when those algorithms are driven by bad human input. More information »