(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.)
![Meeting of the minds: Peter Norvig (top) and Eric Horvitz agree that AI is a key to the future of technology [image courtesy Bart Nagel (top) and Microsoft (bottom), via Technology Review].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/peter_eric_x220.jpeg "Meeting of the minds: Peter Norvig (top) and Eric Horvitz agree that AI is a key to the future of technology [image courtesy Bart Nagel (top) and Microsoft (bottom), via Technology Review].")
MIT’s Technology Review has an in-depth interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and Eric Horvitz, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (and a member of the CCC Council), about their optimism for the future of AI:
Google and Microsoft don’t share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals can agree on some things — like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology.
[Norvig and Horvitz] recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise of AI. Afterward, the pair talked … about what AI can do today, and what they think it’ll be capable of tomorrow…
Technology Review: You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech. What about the areas we want AI to help where there isn’t lots of data to learn from?
» Read more: “Google, Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence”
![SC11 conference - Seattle, WA - Connecting communities through HPC [image courtesy SC].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SC11Logo.jpeg "SC11 conference - Seattle, WA - Connecting communities through HPC [image courtesy SC].")
![Larry Smarr, CalIT2 & UCSD [image courtesy Xconomy]](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/LarrySmarr_Headshot.jpeg "Larry Smarr, CalIT2 & UCSD [image courtesy Xconomy]")
