Microsoft has taken the next step in its plan to grow its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Bonsai. The AI startup is known for its deep reinforcement learning platform designed to help developers integrate AI into complex and dynamic systems.
“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 tremendous progress here and Microsoft remains committed to furthering this work,” Gurdeep Pall, corporate VP of business AI at Microsoft, wrote in a post.
Bonsai developed an approach that abstracts the low-level mechanics of machine learning so that subject matter experts can specific and train autonomous systems. In addition, it established a new reinforcement learning benchmark last fall and extended deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications.
By combining work being done at Microsoft Research with Bonsai’s platform, Microsoft believes it will have one of the best AI toolchains in the industry for building autonomous systems. The AI toolchain will compose with Azure Machine Learning and all models built with it will be deploy and managed in Azure IoT.
“We’re really confident this unique marriage of research, novel approach and technology will have a tremendous effect toward removing barriers and accelerating the current state of AI development. We look forward to having Bonsai and their team join us to help realize this collective vision,” Pall wrote.
