tech:

taffy

Microsoft says it has created machine translation that can work as well as humans

Story on Voice Recognition at Microsoft of Fil & XD on November 24, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)

Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created a machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English, as well as a person.

The company says the results were verified by external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations. Researchers in the company’s Asia and U.S. labs said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, called newstest2017.

According to Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, “Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had. We just didn’t realize we’d be able to hit it so soon.”

[Image: Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures | Image courtesy: Microsoft]

Just in

Vercel raises $250M

San Francisco-based Vercel, a frontend cloud platform provider, has secured $250 million in Series E funding, bringing the company's valuation to $3.25 billion.

Worky raises $6M (Mexico)

Mexico City-based Worky, a provider of HR and payroll software solutions for Mexican companies, has closed a $6 million Series A financing round.

Amazon announces $1.31B investment in France

Amazon has announced a new investment of about $1.31 billion (€1.2 billion) in France, which the company says will lead to the creation of over 3,000 permanent jobs in the country.

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down — CNBC

Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing business, will step down from his role next month. Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services, will succeed Mr. Selipsky after he exits the company June 3, writes Annie Palmer. 

Palo Alto Networks, Accenture expand alliance to offer generative AI services

Palo Alto Networks and Accenture have announced the expansion of their strategic alliance to provide new offerings that combine Palo Alto Networks' Precision AI technology with Accenture's secure generative AI services.