Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. In terms of stock market years, the bull market that kicked off in March 2009 should be on the front cover of AARP magazine. At age 8, the S&P 500 bull run is very old and very overvalued compared to its historical ratios.

Alibaba Group's powerful computing network and wealth of data gives the company key advantages in technological innovation, according to Chief Technology Officer Jeff Zhang, who last week offered a glimpse of products and services Alibaba is readying for rollout that will be based on artificial intelligence. "We have been very successful business-wise, commerce-wise and sometimes that tends to overshadow what we have accomplished on the technological front," Zhang said during an investors conference held at Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China. To support its giant e-commerce business, Alibaba has built a computational network that is the world's fastest cloud-based "streaming processing" platform. "One of our main characteristics is our scale," Zhang said. During Alibaba's blockbuster Singles Day sale last year, the company's platform processed 175,000 transactions a second at peak periods, or 10 million orders per minute.

May 2017 marked another milestone in the timeline of artificial intelligence's capacity to exceed human ability. That day Ke Jie was struggling. The world's top player of the Chinese board game of Go was in game three of his match against AlphaGo, the famed AI Go program. Ke had already lost the first two bouts. And after having publicly stated that he could beat AlphaGo, this was a game he just could not lose.

Started in the 1950's, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has experienced several ups and downs until 2016, when AlphaGo (built by DeepMind, a Google company) defeated the world champion of Go and AI becomes popular in the general public again. The drives for AI's currently popularity are three important breakthroughs: supercomputer, big data, and machine learning algorithm. How is and will AI be influencing the business world? The authors have interviewed Professor J----rgen Schmidhuber, the father of contemporary AI. Professor J----rgen Schmidhuber's lab created Long short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning algorithm in the 1990's, which greatly advanced the development of deep learning and AI.

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in the past few years, but it's also generated much hype over its current capabilities. That's one takeaway from a Friday panel in San Francisco involving leading AI experts hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery for its 50th annual Turing Award for advancements in computer science. Michael Jordan, a machine learning expert and computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, said there is "way too much hype" regarding the capabilities of so-called chat bots. Many of these software programs use an AI technique called deep learning in which they are "trained" on massive amounts of conversation data so that they learn to interact with people. Get Data Sheet, Fortune's technology newsletter.

His impact on artificial intelligence research has been so deep that some people in the field talk about the "six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton" the way college students once referred to Kevin Bacon's uncanny connections to so many Hollywood movies. Dr. Hinton's students and associates are now leading lights of artificial intelligence research at Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber, and run artificial intelligence programs at the University of Montreal and OpenAI, a nonprofit research company. "Geoff, at a time when A.I. was in the wilderness, toiled away at building the field and because of his personality, attracted people who then dispersed," said Ilse Treurnicht, chief executive of Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, an innovation center that will soon house the Vector Institute, Toronto's new public-private artificial intelligence research institute, where Dr. Hinton will be chief scientific adviser. Dr. Hinton also recently set up a Toronto branch of Google Brain, the company's artificial intelligence research project. His tiny office there is not the grand space filled with gadgets and awards that one might expect for a man at the leading edge of the most transformative field of science today.

Nearly 85 percent of travel and hospitality professionals are using AI within their businesses, according to a recent survey by Tata Consultancy Services, which is based in India. So far, the use is largely limited to their information-technology departments, with 46 percent of companies saying they use it for functions such as processing bookings and credit-card transactions. But within four years, 60 percent of companies surveyed said that AI would expand to their marketing efforts - persuading you to book their products. Indeed, most of the AI firepower is reserved for the back-end systems designed to squeeze more profit out of an airline seat or hotel room, or to improve the efficiency of airport operations. For example, flight disruptions cost airlines billions each year, so airports are deploying AI systems to quickly deal with irregular operations.

According to Demis Hassabis, the founder of the leading artificial intelligence company DeepMind, intelligence is computational and computers can replicate it. Hassabis sees this as an incredible tool, like having the world's best research assistant at your fingertips. Where this leads -- solving humanity's greatest challenges or the possibility of AI being used by people with ill intent -- is part of a wide-ranging conversation Hassabis had with The Nikkei on the sidelines of the Future of Go summit held on May 23-27 in Wuzhen, China. Excerpts from the interview follow. Q: You've demonstrated how powerful the combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning is, and based on that, AI can be better than humans in a narrow domain like the game of Go. But how far along are you in terms of fundamentally understanding what intelligence is, and its processes and its mechanisms?

With mobile apps, banking automation and blockchain already transforming financial services, financial institutions are now looking to regulation technology, or regtech, to meet compliance requirements. How can AI help your business grow? Download this e-guide to learn about the real life applications and challenges of AI in finance, security, marketing and more. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration has authorized the sale of unarmed surveillance drones to India, the manufacturer said Friday, as the two nations' leaders prepare for their first face-to-face meeting. India initiated its request to buy 22 Guardian MQ-9B unmanned aircraft for maritime surveillance last year. The deal is estimated to be worth about $2 billion. The offer is still subject to congressional approval. The green light from the administration marks a further deepening in defense ties before India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday. Modi's two-day visit to Washington, which starts Sunday, takes place amid uncertainty over the relationship because of differences on trade and other issues.