Over the last few months we have seen NVIDIA's Pascal GPUs roll out among their consumer cards, and now the time has come for the Tesla line to get its own Pascal update. To that end, at today's GTC Beijing 2016 keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has announced the next generation of NVIDIA's neural network inferencing cards, the Tesla P40 and Tesla P4. These cards are the direct successor to the current Tesla M40 and M4 products, and with the addition of the Pascal architecture, NVIDIA is promising a major leap in inferencing performance. We've covered NVIDIA's presence in and plans for the deep learning market for some time now. Overall the deep learning market is a rapidly growing market, and one that has proven very successful for NVIDIA as the underlying neural networks map well to their GPU architectures.

Microprocessor and chip maker NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence onboard its newest computer system that will power Chinese web company Baidu's self-driving car, according to a Reuters report. Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google, and operates the country's most popular search engine of the same name that holds a 56.3% market share. NVIDIA, as some of us know, is famous for its Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that powers many high-end gaming PCs and laptops, as well as super-fast mobile processors like the Tegra series. But NVIDIA has been eyeing the artificial intelligence space for quite some time now. Because AI requires a very high level of computational power.

Until a few years ago, cars that drove themselves seemed like the stuff of science fiction, but with the world's biggest auto manufacturers and technology companies all taking a serious interest, the day doesn't seem far off when we have fully autonomous cars that do not even have a way for their human passengers to take control. How soon such a day will come is anyone's guess, but if you go by what Ford Motor Co. says, at least for itself, it will be in the middle of the next decade. At Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, CEO Mark Fields told reporters Monday the company will produce, by 2021, a fleet of self-driving taxis for ride-hailing services and by "around mid-decade we'll make vehicles available for people to purchase for themselves." Arguably the most advanced autonomous cars at present are made by Tesla Motors, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, but they are not cheap. Perhaps referring to them, Fields added: " We're dedicated to putting autonomous vehicles on the road for millions of people, not just those who can afford luxury cars."

A Japanese startup is entering the equity research business in a bid to challenge the dominance of securities firms by using computers to crunch vast troves of information and predict companies' earnings. Nowcast Inc., a financial-technology venture formed last year out of the University of Tokyo, will begin providing automated earnings estimates of consumer goods makers as soon as October by analyzing millions of transactions at retail stores, Chief Executive Officer Ryota Hayashi said. The move comes as pressure from Japan's financial regulator prompts brokerages to move away from a long-standing practice of gleaning information from companies about their performance before earnings figures are released. Hayashi sees this as an opportunity for Nowcast to find other ways to estimate companies' results and sell the research to active investors such as hedge funds. "This doesn't mean analysts won't be needed anymore," Hayashi said in an interview.

For the past year, the Dutch National Police and raptor training company Guard From Above have been investigating whether eagles could be an effective way of dealing with potentially dangerous drones. The trials have been a resounding success, and the Dutch police today announced that they're ready to operationally deploy an anti-drone team of specially trained bald eagles and their human partners. This video shows a demo that the Dutch police put on yesterday of a drone threatening a mock state visit. The eagle vs drone action starts at about 1:50. We use all kinds of technological solutions, like electromagnetic pulses, or even laser technology, and one of the projects is the use of birds of prey.

The segment got a shot in the arm when Facebook Messenger opened up to bots in April. WhatsApp has also announced plans to open up for businesses. "Messenger has 1 billion users. The benefit of integrating a bot on Messenger is that it is a hassle free experience, requiring no registration," said Nitin Babel, co-founder of Niki.ai, a startup in the chatbot space. Arihant Jain of Joe Hukum, a bot building startup, adds that with large companies opening to bots, a community of sorts is beginning to develop.

The HDFC Bank has planned to deploy a robot at one of its Mumbai branches under its project named'Project AI' (Artificial Intelligence) that, acting largely as a receptionist, will greet the customers with options such as cash withdrawal or deposit. Automation of services leads to increased productivity, but in case of a jobs-deprived country like India, it might result in further unemployment. HDFC bank, an Indian banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra in Western India, has launched'Project AI' (Artificial Intelligence) under which the bank introduced the concept to deploy a robot at its Mumbai branch, the one that does not deal with too many senior citizens who need personalised service. With its name yet to be finalised, the robot will perform minimal duties. The project may be scaled up, depending upon the success of the pilot program.

The technology and working of Artificial Intelligence is much appreciated. The world has great plans for this nascent technology and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator gave us enough reasons to believe in its goodness. Yet, when tech gurus and geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking themselves fear the advancement of artificial technology to a level of electronic apocalypse, we can hardly accept it in the right spirits. However, AI has evolved and will evolve and we are definitely moving towards a more robotic future but artificial intelligence does not have to be necessarily creepy. It is being used in different sectors and will have huge impact on our day to day lives in days to come.

BEIJING, CHINA - GPU Technology Conference China -- NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today unveiled a palm-sized, energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) computer that automakers can use to power automated and autonomous vehicles for driving and mapping. The new single-processor configuration of the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 AI computing platform for AutoCruise functions -- which include highway automated driving and HD mapping -- consumes just 10 watts of power and enables vehicles to use deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors. It will be deployed by China's Baidu as the in-vehicle car computer for its self-driving cloud-to-car system. DRIVE PX 2 enables automakers and their tier 1 suppliers to accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles. A car using the small form-factor DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise can understand in real time what is happening around it, precisely locate itself on an HD map and plan a safe path forward.

We won't have robot doctors for a long time, but the human doctors we have now are beginning to lean on specialized artificial intelligence to help save time. Google DeepMind just announced a partnership with University College London Hospital which will explore using artificial intelligence to treat patients with head and neck cancers. The goal is to develop tools to automatically identify cancerous cells for radiology machines. Currently, radiologists employ a manual process, called image segmentation, to take CT and MRI scans and use them to create a map of the patient's anatomy with clear guidelines of where to direct the radiation. Avoiding healthy areas of the head and neck requires that map to be extraordinarily detailed; typically it takes four hours to create.