How does Microsoft use AI to make Windows 10 updates smoother

Question

According to this news, Microsoft is using AI to make Windows 10 updates smoother. So I was curious and went further to search and came across this website, which describes:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be a key area of investment for Microsoft, and we’re pleased to announce that for the first time we’ve leveraged AI at scale to greatly improve the quality and reliability of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rollout. Our AI approach intelligently selects devices that our feedback data indicate would have a great update experience and offers the April 2018 Update to these devices first. As our rollout progresses, we continuously collect update experience data and retrain our models to learn which devices will have a positive update experience, and where we may need to wait until we have higher confidence in a great experience. Our overall rollout objective is for a safe and reliable update, which means we only go as fast as is safe.

Our AI/Machine Learning approach started with a pilot program during the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update rollout. We studied characteristics of devices that data indicated had a great update experience and trained our model to spot and target those devices. In our limited trial during the Fall Creators Update rollout, we consistently saw a higher rate of positive update experiences for devices identified using the AI model, with fewer rollbacks, uninstalls, reliability issues, and negative user feedback. For the April 2018 Update rollout, we substantially expanded the scale of AI by developing a robust AI machine learning model to teach the system how to identify the best target devices based on our extensive listening systems.

To me, it sounds like simple if-else statements would have implemented the whole thing without touching the AI; they mentioned that positive experiences include fewer rollbacks, uninstalls, and so on, so we may use these as a criterion of a positive experience.

I am just wondering if the word 'AI' is being misused, or can be misleading in this context? Could anyone point me out on this or give any insight on how AI can be used in this context? In my experience, I have only seen AI mostly being used in speech recognition, image recognition and other sort-of classifying problems, with a training and consequently a computer can "learn" from the data, not like an if-else statement. Today, AI seems to be everything that is considered "smart"?

Answer 1

Hint : According to antlersoft's comment which says

".....Microsoft may well have used a neural network classifier to scan through it's telemetry to find good update candidates, it's clearly a classification problem.... "

This could be right,however,here questions (information) concerning the company's internal research and development of their software products is classified.

Any machine learning engineer; is not professionally allowed to discuss nor give out information pertaining the company's product i.e. source codes,plan/design or even the flow of the conceptual idea on how the system is implemented,and this is inline with what the question is all about.

Therefore,if you're passionate about how Microsoft implements artificial intelligence in previous operating system software source codes,then by all means you have to check out its;

BetaArchive Discussion and Collection of Betas and Abandonware;

If you're a serious machine learning engineer,this community can help you as well,it releases them for developers and those who are passionately about open source project contribution.

The archive holds terabytes of files,which you can download for free. So select which windows files have some machine learning algorithms in! I wanted to give you a little bit of a glimpse,if you're a machine learning engineer.

For your information; answers to this question, will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions,rather than facts concerning Microsoft's software products.