This August, some of the world's best professional gamers will travel to Vancouver to fight for millions of dollars in the world's most valuable esports competition. They'll be joined by a team of five artificial intelligence bots backed by Elon Musk, trying to set a new marker for the power of machine learning. The bots were developed by OpenAI, an independent research institute the Tesla CEO cofounded in 2015 to advance AI and prevent the technology from turning dangerous. Vancouver is hosting the annual world championship of Dota 2, one of the internet's most-watched videogames. The prize purse is more than $15 million and growing, exceeding the $11 million at stake at golf's Masters.

The 300,000-square-foot (27,000-square-meter) warehouse in the western Indianapolis suburb of Plainfield will be stocked with 5,000 different items before it opens next month, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported . The warehouse is managed by a system of robots, tote bins, electronic controls and software.

In 2015, a worried father asked Rhema Vaithianathan a question that still weighs on her mind. A small crowd had gathered in a basement room in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to hear her explain how software might tackle child abuse. Each day, the area's hotline receives dozens of calls from people who suspect that a child is in danger; some of these are then flagged by call-centre staff for investigation. But the system does not catch all cases of abuse. Vaithianathan and her colleagues had just won a half-million-dollar contract to build an algorithm to help. Vaithianathan, a health economist who co-directs the Centre for Social Data Analytics at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, told the crowd how the algorithm might work. For example, a tool trained on reams of data -- including family backgrounds and criminal records -- could generate risk scores when calls come in.

Amazon staff have called on founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos to stop sales of AWS Rekognition facial recognition tech to U.S. law enforcement. Amazon employees have written a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos in which they ask the company to stop selling its facial recognition tool to American law enforcement. The tech giant's sales to U.S. cops was revealed by an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) investigation earlier this month, as it emerged Amazon Web Services' Rekognition tool was shipped to police in Florida and Oregon. The cost of the tool was also revealed to be remarkably low, as evidenced by a Forbes test of the product, in which a facial recognition project was set up for free across the publication's Jersey City and London offices. In a letter posted to an internal forum, first revealed by The Hill and published in full by Gizmodo, some employees expressed the same concerns as the ACLU about the power of Amazon's Rekognition being abused by American officers.

The "safety" driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber that hit and killed a pedestrian was streaming the television show The Voice on her phone at the time of the crash, police have said. The collision that killed Elaine Herzberg, 49, who was crossing the road at night in Tempe, Arizona, was "entirely avoidable", a police report said, if Rafaela Vasquez had been paying attention. Instead she repeatedly looked down at her phone, glancing up just a half second before the car hit Herzberg. Police said she could faces charges of vehicle manslaughter, but it would be for prosecutors to decide. The Uber car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash, but Uber, like other self-driving car developers, requires a back-up driver in the car to intervene when the autonomous system fails or a tricky driving situation occurs.

Ronald Shrewsbery II used to be the Robot Doctor. Now he's known by the more bureaucratic-sounding title "WCM (World Class Manufacturing) Electrical Technical Specialist," but he still doctors the robots. There are a thousand of these machines inside Ohio's Toledo Assembly Complex, a 312-acre manufacturing leviathan dedicated to producing Jeeps. The Toledo Assembly Complex is one of the most heavily automated car factories in the United States. It can extrude 500 cars in a shift, far more than the Cove, the old Jeep plant that was shut down in 2006. And the machines make the work easier. There used to be a lot more lifting, more pushing.

For the past five years, the hottest thing in artificial intelligence has been a branch known as deep learning. The grandly named statistical technique, put simply, gives computers a way to learn by processing massive amounts of data. Thanks to deep learning, computers can easily identify faces and recognize spoken words, making other forms of humanlike intelligence suddenly seem within reach. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have poured money into deep learning. And the technology's perception and pattern-matching abilities are being applied to improve progress in fields such as drug discovery and self-driving cars.

In this scenario, neighbours have been complaining that something smelly is coming from a nearby house. You've been called to the scene. This is what you'd hear if you were on one of the eight military and civilian bomb squad teams competing in the Robot Rodeo last week, an annual event hosted by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Over 3.2 million pictures of animals - captured by hidden cameras - have been identified by Snapshot Serengeti volunteers and the data collected is being used to power the AI algorithm, using deep neural networks.

Google Translate has become the internet's go-to resource for short, quick translations from foreign languages. The service was first launched in April 2006, seeing off early competition from the likes of Babel Fish. It now boasts more than 500m users daily worldwide, offering 103 languages. But how exactly does it work? How does Google News actually work?