Tesla Motors Inc.'s Autopilot has been in the news a lot of late, and not only because of the vehicles crashes involving (or not) the self-driving system or updates to it that would have prevented at least some of those crashes. On Wednesday, Tesla's erstwhile partner in its Autopilot development, Israeli chipmaker Mobileye, said it had decided to split with the Elon Musk-owned company because of concerns over Autopilot, with Tesla "pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Speaking to Reuters, Mobileye Chairman Amnon Shashua said of Autopilot: "It is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system." In response, a Tesla spokeswoman had initially said the company never advertised its Autopilot as a self-driving technology or its cars as autonomous vehicles.

During the British summer, conversations about sport become almost ubiquitous. This year, however, one participant in those conversations was very different: IBM Watson, IBM's cognitive intelligence. The All England Lawn Tennis Club knew that 2016 would feature unusually fierce competition for attention, with the Tour de France and Euro 2016 taking place alongside Wimbledon. More than ever before, social media was going to be a vital tool in directing that conversation, and directing attention to SW19. Wimbledon's "Cognitive Command Centre" – powered by Watson's intelligence running on a hybrid, IBM-managed cloud - scanned social media for emerging news and trends.

AI will become the defining technology of the 21st century and in 30 years from now we will wonder how we ever got along without our seemingly telepathic digital assistants, writes Marc Benioff. OVER the last 30 years, consumers have reaped the benefits of dramatic technological advances. In many countries, most people now have in their pockets a personal computer more powerful than the mainframes of the 1980s. The Atari 800XL computer that I developed games on when I was in high school was powered by a microprocessor with 3,500 transistors; the computer running on my iPhone today has 2bn transistors. Back then, a gigabyte of storage cost 100,000 and was the size of a refrigerator; today it's basically free and is measured in millimetres. Even with these massive gains, we can expect still faster progress as the entire planet -- people and things -- becomes connected.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Baidu, the Chinese-based internet services conglomerate, has made several major announcements about its upcoming IoT projects. The company's plans center on a revamped artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which the company hopes will enable it to effectively increase its presence in the world of the IoT. Baidu plans to use this revamped AI platform to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, reports Bloomberg. It will be working with speaker manufacturer Harman Industries to develop the device, which it hopes will allow users to order food, summon a ride, or control smart home products via voice commands.

People hoping that the driverless cars of the future will give them more free time while travelling may be in for a disappointment. Increased productivity is one of the expected benefits of self-driving cars, but a new study claims that they will have little impact. The study showed that nearly nearly 36 percent of Americans say they would be so apprehensive using a driverless vehicle that they would only watch the road. Meanwhile UK drivers were even more cautious at 44 per cent. The average vehicle trip is only around 19 minutes long which doesn't give enough time for any sustained productive activity, say the researchers.

Claude Shannon liked to play games when he wasn't particularly busy building mathematical models. In one of his party games (the Shannon Switching Game), he drew a graph that had two special nodes A and B. Each edge of the graph is either coloured or deleted--the initial state of each edge is decided randomly. Two players, one named Cut and the other Short, make a move alternately. Short's job is to colour an edge in each of his turns; he wins if he can establish a coloured path from A to B. Cut's job is to prevent Short from doing so; if Cut manages to partition A and B, she wins. The Shannon Switching Game is quite enthralling.

Pete Skomoroch and Jon Bruner will be hosting O'Reilly Bot Day October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Bots Podcast to learn about advances in conversational user interfaces, artificial intelligence, and messaging that are revolutionizing the way we interact with software. Find us on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. Greylock Partners investor Sarah Guo joins us for episode two of our new pop-up podcast on bots and conversational interfaces. She's written insightfully on bots and has worked on several investments in bot startups. We open by asking how bots fit into Sarah's investment thesis and why bot startups are appealing right now (short answer: they sit at the intersection between messaging, AI-based search, and mobile commerce).

Tesla faces new scrutiny in China about its vehicle Autopilot system after state television broadcast allegations that a man killed in a crash had activated the driver-assist feature of his car. The state broadcaster CCTV aired a report Wednesday about a January crash that killed 23-year-old Gao Yaning. The report included apparent dash cam footage of the car slamming into a slow-moving orange truck. An official interviewed in the report said the car's Autopilot feature was active at the time of the crash. CCTV reported Gao's family has sued Tesla in a Beijing court, though the lawsuit was not available in online court records.

I am happy to announce that Prelert and Elastic are joining forces. Ever since we started Elastic, our goal has been to allow users to easily find relevant data or insights within large amounts of data. Search is a wonderful way to do it, and the ability to slice, dice, and aggregate the data in an unconstrained way allowed users to feel they are in control of the data, compared to the other way around. But we can take it a step forward, and with Prelert, we just did. Prelert has developed an unsupervised machine learning engine that can plow through large amounts of data and automatically find those insights our users today have been proactively finding using search.

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.