The race between two key chip makers to put self-driving cars on the streets is getting heated. And it's no less entertaining, involving the likes of BB8, a self-driving Nvidia car named after a droid in Star Wars, and the company's automotive supercomputer called Xavier, named after an X-men superhero. These two playfully named products are a big part of Nvidia's ambitious plans to put a fleet of self-driving cars on the streets by 2020. Nvidia is collaborating with Audi to develop these autonomous cars, which will be based on the Drive-PX computer. Nvidia's announcement comes just a day after Intel and BMW said they were putting 40 self-driving cars on the street by the end of this year.

In-home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are handy, but their functions are limited: They can tell you where to find a can of soda, but they can't actually bring one to you. Robotics company Ewaybot created Moro as a rolling, humanoid assistant for research labs and universities, and it's currently in a handful of schools across China. Moro is about four feet tall, weighs roughly 77 pounds, and its arms have six points of articulation; they each end in a three-pronged version of a hand that can grip everything from pens to heavy vials. The robot responds to voice communication as well (watch out, Alexa). Moro uses Intel's RealSense camera to avoid obstacles, plus ultrasound and infrared sensors.

When Tay started its short digital life on March 23, it just wanted to gab and make some new friends on the net. The chatbot, which was created by Microsoft's Research department, greeted the day with an excited tweet that could have come from any teen: "hellooooooo w rld!!!" Within a few hours, though, Tay's optimistic, positive tone had changed. "Hitler was right I hate the jews," it declared in a stream of racist tweets bashing feminism and promoting genocide. Concerned about their bot's rapid radicalization, Tay's creators shut it down after less than 24 hours of existence. Microsoft had unwittingly lowered their burgeoning artificial intelligence into -- to use the parlance of the very people who corrupted her -- a virtual dumpster fire.

After suffering its first defeat in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on Sunday, the Go-playing AI AlphaGo has beaten world-class player Lee Se-dol for a fourth time to win the five-game series 4-1 overall. The final game proved to be a close one, with both sides fighting hard and going deep into overtime. AlphaGo is an AI developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, and had already wrapped up a historic victory on Saturday by becoming the first ever computer program to beat a top-level Go player. The win came after a "bad mistake" made early in the game, according to DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, leaving AlphaGo "trying hard to claw it back." By winning the final game despite its blip in the fourth, AlphaGo has demonstrated beyond doubt its superiority over one of the world's best Go players, reaffirming a major milestone for artificial intelligence in the process. It was "the most mindblowing game experience we've had so far," said DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis at the post-match press conference, with an "incredibly close and tense finish." Lee said that he felt sorry the match was coming to an end, while expressing how difficult it has been from a psychological perspective.

While we're not far away from possibly seeing the first ever, completely automated organization, the next revolution in technology leading to it will'once again' compete with people and their jobs. While the threat of automation and its consequent effects on the employment economy of Asia's biggest countries is looming, senior executives of global firms across Asia believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics will measurably increase their performance and overall efficiency. MIT Technology Review in collaboration with ADP surveyed and conducted several in-depth interviews with executives across Asia-Pacific and senior HR professionals to gather perspective on this changing landscape. Now, outside of leaders in global robotics (Japan and Korea), large Asian economies like China and India generate copious amounts of data, a tremendous'natural resource' that keepings redefining the boundaries of AI's capabilities.

Self-driving car tech is one of the big themes of this year's CES expo in Las Vegas. South Korea's Hyundai is one of those showing off a prototype. But when the BBC's Dave Lee put it to the test, it had to deal with other drivers making illegal manoeuvres.

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Jan 4, 2017) - CES -- NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today unveiled the new NVIDIA SHIELD TV -- an Android open-platform media streamer built on bleeding-edge visual computing technology that delivers unmatched experiences in streaming, gaming and AI. Sporting a sleek, new design and now shipping with both a remote and a game controller, SHIELD provides the best, most complete entertainment experience in the living room. "NVIDIA's rich heritage in visual computing and deep learning has enabled us to create this revolutionary device," said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, who revealed SHIELD during his opening keynote address at CES. "SHIELD TV is the world's most advanced streamer. Its brilliant 4K HDR quality, hallmark NVIDIA gaming performance and broad access to media content will bring families hours of joy. And with SHIELD's new AI home capability, we can control and interact with content through the magic of artificial intelligence from anywhere in the house," he said.

Panasonic Corporation of North America announced it has developed a "companion" robot with human-like movements and communication skills. The robot, developed as a proof of concept, debuts at the Panasonic booth (#12908) at CES 2017 in Las Vegas. This Smart News Release features multimedia. "This test project builds on Panasonic's innovations in robotics including battery and power solutions, vision and sensing, navigation solutions and motion control in a new appealing design. This is Panasonic's latest effort in demonstrating network services in a friendly package, and we are showing this robot at CES as a way of obtaining feedback on its features and functions," said Takahiro Iijima, Director, Panasonic Design Strategy Office in North America Director. The robot is equipped with a Wi-Fi network function that accesses artificial intelligence-based natural language processing technology.

BlackBerry QNX is off to a great start at CES 2017. Today they announced what they are calling their "most advanced and secure embedded software platform for autonomous drive and connected cars," which is also known as QNX SDP 7.0. "With the push toward connected and autonomous vehicles, the electronic architecture of cars is evolving – from a multitude of smaller processors each executing a dedicated function, to a set of high performance domain controllers, powered by 64-bit processors and graphical processing units. To develop these new systems, our automotive customers will need a safe and secure 64-bit OS that can run highly complex software, including neural networks and artificial intelligence algorithms. QNX SDP 7.0 is suited not only for cars, but also for almost any safety- or mission-critical application that requires 64-bit performance and advanced security. This includes surgical robots, industrial controllers and high-speed trains."

One of Huawei's biggest priorities when building its Mate 9 was shoehorning some handy machine learning features into to it. A machine learning algorithm designed to improve performance by finding the patterns in how you use the phone and allocating resources like RAM accordingly. Turns out Huawei's AI ambitions don't end there: a spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the Mate 9 will receive a software update that brings Amazon's Alexa to that surprisingly slick phablet. We're not entirely sure of the timing yet, but we can confirm that the update will roll out in the US (obviously) and a handful of other markets. Either way, this is a big step for Huawei and for Amazon; the former gets to sell the first properly Alexa-enabled smartphone and Amazon gets the chance to forge a partnership with one of the biggest smartphone makers in China by volume.