A "high-tech robot" praised on Russian TV was actually a man in wearing a costume. No one said the "most modern robot" at a Russian technology event was a real robot, but it appears no one said it wasn't either. So, some journalists covering the state-sponsored event for children had a lot of questions when Robot Boris appeared on stage talking and dancing. He also could answer math equations. Coverage on Russian state TV praised the "hi-tech robot" at the annual Proyektoria technology forum, The Guardian reports, even praising its intelligent dance moves.

In the early 1970s, a British grad student named Geoff Hinton began to make simple mathematical models of how neurons in the human brain visually understand the world. Artificial neural networks, as they are called, remained an impractical technology for decades. But in 2012, Hinton and two of his grad students at the University of Toronto used them to deliver a big jump in the accuracy with which computers could recognize objects in photos. Within six months, Google had acquired a startup founded by the three researchers. Previously obscure, artificial neural networks were the talk of Silicon Valley.

AI and deep learning are invading the enterprise. NVIDIA Corporation is in the midst of an unprecedented run, delivering targeted technology and products that enable companies to learn from their data. These learnings can lead to competitive insights, recognizing new trends, fueling control systems for intelligent infrastructure, or simply providing predictive capabilities to better manage the business. The challenge in deploying these systems is one of balance. Storage in the datacenter has evolved to service the needs of mainstream business applications, not highly-parallel deep learning systems.

At first bite, it seems no more than a clever way to boost sales at the expense of a competitor. When a hungry customer walks into a McDonald's (or within 600 feet of one), they can use the Burger King app to order a Whopper for a penny. The app will then provide directions to the nearest BK, where the now famished customer can pick it up. The promotion, good until December 12, is called the Whopper Detour. Burger King's marketing chief told CNN Business that more than 50,000 people have cashed in on the deal, and the fast food giant's app jumped to first place in the iTunes App Store's Food and Drink category.

Chris Lister, vice president of operations of the Tesla Gigafactory, provides insight during a tour on Dec. 3, 2018. Big numbers are one way to appreciateTesla's gargantuan Nevada Gigafactory. Operating 24-hours per day in shifts, workers produce enough battery packs and drive units in a week to power 5,300 of Tesla's Model 3 sedans. Tesla says at 5.4 million square feet, roughly equivalent to 50 Home Depot stores, the factory is just 30 percent of its potential size and is already producing more batteries than all other carmakers combined. With more than 7,000 Tesla workers, the factory is responsible for increasing manufacturing employment in the Reno-Sparks area by 55 percent since 2014, according to the Governor's Office of Economic Development.

A Bristol-based robotics company, Open Bionics, has developed the world's first medically-certified 3D-printed artificial arm for amputees. The Hero Arm, with its artificial hand, can fit children as young as nine years old. Its motor is controlled by muscles on the residual limb, allowing the user to carry out many tasks as if the hand was real. Open Bionics hope the £5,000 bionic arm could be made available on the NHS. BBC Click's Kathleen Hawkins went to meet Raimi, who says the arm has given her a new confidence.

Metamaterials seem like a technology out of science fiction. Because of the way these materials affect electromagnetic phenomena and physical attributes of materials, they can render objects invisible, leaving the observer in disbelief. While invisibility cloaks are a gee-whiz application, metamaterials now offer real-world commercial applications such as new antenna technologies for mobile phones. To get to the point where metamaterials are not just a curiosity, but also a viable commercial technology, they have had to evolve a new set of tricks . One example is the work of a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Google is working to reduce gender bias in its Google Translate tool after it was accused of sexism for automatically translating sentences to include masculine pronouns. Translations from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish will also now provide a feminine alternative as well as a masculine one for gendered words such as "strong" or "beautiful." In the past, Google's algorithm had to choose between masculine or feminine when translating a word - automatically defaulting to masculine in many instances. Additionally, the tool will offer gender-specific translations for phrases and sentences from Turkish to English. The update comes after two Stanford University professors pointed out that the artificial intelligence used by Google Translate was converting news articles written in Spanish to English by changing phrases referring to women into "he said" or "he wrote."

DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go. That earlier system had itself made history by beating one of the world's best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement. AlphaZero trained itself--in just 3 days. AlphaZero, playing White against Stockfish, began by identifying four candidate moves.

Artificial intelligence has made major strides in the past few years, but those rapid advances are now raising some big ethical conundrums. Chief among them is the way machine learning can identify people's faces in photos and video footage with great accuracy. This might let you unlock your phone with a smile, but it also means that governments and big corporations have been given a powerful new surveillance tool. A new report from the AI Now Institute (large PDF), an influential research institute based in New York, has just identified facial recognition as a key challenge for society and policymakers. The speed at which facial recognition has grown comes down to the rapid development of a type of machine learning known as deep learning.