Microsoft created Tay as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with Web users in casual conversation. The project was designed to interact with and "learn" from the young generation of millennials. Tay began its short-lived Twitter tenure on Wednesday with a handful of innocuous tweets. In one typical example, Tay tweeted, "feminism is cancer," in response to a Twitter user who had posted the same message. Lee, in the blog post, called Web users' efforts to exert a malicious influence on the chatbot "a coordinated attack by a subset of people." "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack," Lee wrote.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week. The company released an official apology after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade, likening feminism to cancer and suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. Related: Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the disastrous experiment, Microsoft initially only gave a terse statement, saying Tay was a "learning machine" and "some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it."

The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft's Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.

If each atom in our universe were itself a universe, then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be about the same as the number of possible positions on the board in the ancient Chinese game of "Go." The game's complexity makes chess look like hopscotch. Until recently, the world's leading minds in artificial intelligence predicted that the world's smartest AIs--which have beat humans at chess by brute force for years now--were still a long, long way from "solving" Go. On March 12, a computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match against 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol and defeated him, 4-1, after Lee and other top professionals predicted he could win 5-0 or 4-1. AlphaGo, developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, has been awarded the rank of 9-dan, the highest possible professional Go ranking that takes human players decades to achieve.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Marketers use the word "handmade" to signal that a product is worth an extra couple bucks -- be it cheddar or loafer. But it's not just physical goods that are made more quickly and cheaply by machine. Artificial intelligence is making decisions that would previously be done by humans. In a new post, Fast Company's Sarah Kessler reports on the on-demand concierge startup GoButler, which just went from having humans handle requests to solely relying on algorithms. "My general view is that people will always want convenience, but they're not willing to pay premiums for it," says GoButler CEO Navid Hadzaad.

Microsoft has blamed a "co-ordinated attack" by Twitter users for the racist and other offensive comments spouted by an automatedBillionaire Says Smarter Tech Will Destroy Jobs At a Record Clip. Read more ... » chatbot it released on the social networkMicrosoft's HoloLens award recipients, Instagram client pulled from iOS store,…. The claim came as the softwareMicrosoft Integrates Cortana, Power BI. Read more ... » company was forced into a strenuous apology for the tweets sent out by its artificialMicrosoft and I can see that this blog post displeases you. Read more ... » characterHow Imperson Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Bring Miss Piggy To Life. Read more ... », called Tay.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted). Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014.

IN 1996 IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a game of chess against one of its computers, Deep Blue. Mr Kasparov, regarded as one of the best-ever players, won--but Deep Blue won the rematch. Two decades on, computers are much better than humans at chess but remain amateurs when it comes to the much tougher, ancient game of Go. Or at least, they did. Now a computer has managed to thrash a top-drawer human player.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is expected to be the next big thing in technology, and many tech companies are investing heavily to make sure they don't lose out on opportunities as and when the technology becomes more mainstream in the coming years. While AI has already started intriguing and exciting industry insiders and tech enthusiasts alike, the increasing chatter surrounding the new technology has given rise to multiple concerns regarding job losses and science fiction-like scenarios of AI-enabled robots starting to exert control over humans, eventually taking over the planet, not unlike the dystopian sci-fi movie'I, Robot'. While Alphabet Chairman, Mr. Eric Schmidt, has already admitted that jobs may be at stake because of artificial intelligence, the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, recently categorically denied that AI-enabled robots are about to take over the planet any time soon. Whatever be the case, most established technology companies are diving into AI-related research headlong, and while American tech giants like Google and Facebook are already burning the midnight oil on research related to artificial intelligence, South Korean conglomerate, Samsung, is also spending the big bucks by investing in a number of tech startups worldwide, in an effort to increase its presence in the sector. According to reports in the South Korean media, Samsung Venture Investment, which happens to be a subsidiary of the Samsung Group and hence, a sister concern for Samsung Electronics, has already invested a truckload of money in more than ten global tech companies, all of which are deeply involved in AI-related research.