When technologists meet up to talk about driverless cars, they get all dewey-eyed about the wonders ahead: A dramatic reduction in traffic deaths. Time saved, more convenience, less stress. But Paul Saffo, the California futurist, told attendees at a car technology conference in Mountain View on Monday that, like with any new technology, there will be bad stuff too. When you don't need to drive, you don't even need windows. And some driverless car prototypes, he noted, don't have them.

The tech giant's AI software is named after Albert Einstein. Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff touted a vision of the future in which everything and everyone will be connected and driven by machine learning and data. Benioff was launching his company's foray into artificial intelligence last week in front of 170,000 people at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. While the future-looking technology has been in the works for years and was built by hundreds of data scientists, Salesforce's AI tool actually takes a branding lesson from the past--specifically, from Albert Einstein. Salesforce unveiled Einstein in September and at Dreamforce explained how it works.

The film was released on September 30, to a very bad buzz because of three different reasons. The first being that Guo Jingming was criticized for copying a piece of Japanese entertainment called'Fate/Stay, Night'. The second reason for the bad buzz is due the poor production values of the film. Guo Jingming said that he spent 100 million RMB on the film's CGI, but the result is really bad. It looks more like a bad video game than an expensive movie, and people thought he put more money into PR and buying celebrities than into quality production values.

In a quest to understand the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising, The Drum, in partnership with Teads, has unveiled a new documentary, The Automation of Creativity, shot in Tokyo, London and Amsterdam. The 16-minute film explores how artificial intelligence is beginning to impact the creativity of advertising and the role of human creatives. To date, artificial intelligence (AI) machines have been able to write poetry, drive cars and there is even talk of a machine possibly winning a Pulitzer one day. Turning the focus on the ad industry, The Automation of Creativity film stars the world's first artificial intelligence creative director, AI-CD ß, launched by McCann Erickson Japan. AI-CD ß is set a brief by Mondelez in the film and presents its creative idea back to the client.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

China's biggest search engine -- introduced an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot on Tuesday to connect with patients, field medical questions and suggest diagnoses to doctors. The company is calling the bot -- a new feature of the Baidu Doctor app it launched last year -- Melody the medical assistant. Baidu has developed advanced deep learning and natural language processing technologies to power Melody's artificially intelligent "brain." The bot is designed to be the first port of call for a person feeling sick at home. A patient poses a health query to Melody, which responds in real time with further questions, and compares responses with Baidu's database of medical information.

This 4-foot-tall robot with a tablet for a chest may soon find its way to a big-box store near you. Omar Abdelwahed, Head of Studio at SoftBank Robotics America, demos the capabilities of a humanoid robot, called Pepper, which is supposed to help customers shop in stores. SAN FRANCISCO – The four-foot tall robot whirling around the new offices of SoftBank Robotics America could well be your big-box store greeter of the near future. "Hi, I'm Pepper," says the sentient hunk of whirling white plastic and blinking lights. That remains to be seen.

Artificial intelligence continues to have its moment in the spotlight, with a surge of interest in startups and efforts from huge tech companies to push the boundaries of how we might best use machine learning, computer vision and other areas of AI in the future. The latest development on that front comes from China's Huawei, which today announced that it would form a research partnership with UC Berkeley focused on AI, and fund it to the initial tune of 1 million. The alliance, between Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a "strategic partnership into basic research", and it will cover areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. "The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large," Huawei notes. Some of these areas of AI you will have heard a lot about already.

Lili Cheng is a general manager for Microsoft Research focusing on conversational experiences, bots, and intelligence systems. Lili's team is responsible for the Microsoft Bot Framework (part of Cortana Intelligence) as well as bringing together the community of bot creators, channels, tools, and AI experts in events such as Botness, Microsoft Research's Design Expo, and the Social Computing Symposium. Previously, Lili was director of user experience for Microsoft Windows and also worked in Apple Computer's Advanced Technology group on the User Interface research team, where she focused on Quicktime conferencing and Quicktime VR. Lili is a registered architect; she worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on commercial urban design and large-scale building projects. She has taught in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications program as well as at Harvard University.

Small enough to fit in the cup holder of your Corolla, the robot is described by Toyota (TM) as "a miniature communication partner developed to provide companionship." Named Kirobo Mini, the 4-inch high gizmo can apparently chat away and even respond to facial expressions. "Oh no, what has happened?" it asks in response to a young woman's downcast face in a Toyota video. The world's biggest automaker plans to put Kirobo on sale in dealerships across Japan next year for around 400 before tax. It didn't mention any plans for introducing it in other countries.