The company launched the bot as an experiment in AI on Wednesday, and in less than a day, it began to tweet things like "Hitler was right I hate the jews" and "I f------ hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." Tay is essentially one central program that anyone can chat with using Twitter, Kik or Groupme. As people talk to it, the bot picks up new language and learns to respond in new ways. But Tay also had a "vulnerability" that online trolls picked up on pretty quickly. By telling the bot to "repeat after me," Tay would retweet anything that someone said.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time. From my vantage point as a venture investor at Playfair Capital, where I focus on investing and building community around AI, I see this as a great time for investors to help build companies in this space. There are three key reasons. First, with 40 percent of the world's population now online, and more than 2 billion smartphones being used with increasing addiction every day (KPCB), we're creating data assets, the raw material for AI, that describe our behaviors, interests, knowledge, connections and activities at a level of granularity that has never existed. Second, the costs of compute and storage are both plummeting by orders of magnitude, while the computational capacity of today's processors is growing, making AI applications possible and affordable.

Just by typing the letters "A," "r-o-b," "w-r-o," "t-h-i," and "s-e-n" into the text messenger on a mobile phone, the predictive text function helped write that first sentence. What will do so is software such as StatsMonkey, which can automate sports reporting. The software analyzes statistics from a baseball game and "generates natural language text" to come up with phrases such as "Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning" and even includes quotes from players. This is just one of the many well-researched examples presented by Martin Ford in his scarily intriguing new book, "Rise of the Robots." Ford is not some Luddite scared of technology, though.

It won't be a surprise if most people familiar with artificial intelligence equate it to Watson. IBM Watson became an overnight star when it participated in the quiz show Jeopardy!, defeating former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. That was some four years ago. But now when artificial intelligence is slowly climbing the mainstream technology ladder, will enterprises intelligently use cognitive computing in 2016? Well, even Watson will find it difficult to answer.

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, has issued an apology for the behaviour of Tay, the company's new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was unveiled earlier this week. Within 24 hours of going online, Tay was grounded after trolls on Twitter quickly corrupted it into a machine that spewed racist, sexist and xenophobic slurs. "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," Lee wrote in a blog post. "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." Developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, Tay was created to conduct research on "conversational training."

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.