Life essentials made better and more affordable." These are the types of startups that partner Paul Buchheit said were demoing today at Y Combinator's Winter 2016 Demo Day 2. Yesterday, we covered the first 60 startups from the batch, and picked our 7 favorites. Buchheit went on to say about today's big aspirations, "Those challenges may seem too large or too complex for a startup to solve. But as Kyle and Dan showed us with Cruise, often the hardest problems are the best investments." He was referring the GM's 1 billion acquisition of Cruise, a YC startup that built self-driving car tech. Today, the room was jam packed, with more chairs brought in for rich investors who were forced to sit on the floor yesterday. Buchheit joked about the first YC batch in summer 2005, saying "Back then no one wanted to go to Demo Day." Someone in the crowd yelled, "15 people wanted to go to Demo Day." Now, there are several hundred VCs avidly watching the presentations. Over the past few years, Y Combinator has expanded to accept startups from a much wider range of industries than traditional apps, including biotech, energy, hardware, and international logistics. When we spoke to investors in the past, some worried they might not have the expertise necessary to evaluate these companies. Now, YC President Sam Altman tells me many VCs have "hired other experts" to fill the gaps. He says "it's become fashionable to hire a Chief Science Officer." As a result, Altman believes that when it comes to funding, these alternative startups "seem to be doing just was well if not a little better" than their traditional software batchmates. Spinal Singularity – Better catheter Last year, over 5 million people were catheterized. Spinal Singularity wants to tap into the 2 billion urinary catheter market with a connected catheter that allows you to control the flow of urine by actuating a magnetic valve. The connected catheter is minimally invasive, and can be inserted or extracted in your own home.

Auto makers need to push regulators around the world for consistent rules to allow autonomous cars to proliferate, the chief executive of Renault SA RNO -1.16 % and Nissan Motor NSANY -1.97 % Co. said Wednesday. Carlos Ghosn, speaking at the New York International Auto Show, said he expects autonomous vehicles to become more commonplace in coming years, eventually changing lanes on highways and driving through cities on their own. His companies plan to offer 10 autonomous-drive models by 2020. But differing regulations could present hurdles to clearing them for operation, he said. "It's very important that we…lobby in every single country with the regulatory authorities to take our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel," Mr. Ghosn said, noting that his companies are working with U.S. and Japanese regulators.

While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.

Associated Press/Ahn Young-joonTV screens show the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match between Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, and South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, at the Yongsan Electronic store in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. Humans have been taking a beating from computers lately. The 4-1 defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) is only the latest in a string of pursuits in which technology has triumphed over humanity. Self-driving cars are already less accident-prone than human drivers, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! is a lost cause, and in chess humans have fallen so woefully behind computers that a recent international tournament was won by a mobile phone. There is a real sense that this month's human vs AI Go match marks a turning point.

Google and Facebook aren't the only ones vying to be the standard bearer for the hottest AI technique around. China's leading Internet search company, Baidu, which is also investing heavily in a popular and powerful machine-learning technology called deep learning, today released some key code that it uses to make this AI software run very efficiently. Baidu's code was recently used to build an impressive speech-recognition system called Deep Speech 2. For some short sentences, this system is better than most humans at recognizing speech correctly (see "Baidu's Deep-Learning System Rivals People at Speech Recognition"). This is an especially useful technology for Baidu, because it offers a better way for the company's many millions of users to access its services, especially on mobile. Typing Chinese characters on a smartphone is tricky and complex, and many people in China already prefer to use their voice to send short messages or to search the Web for information.

A good friend recently told me that it takes a special kind of nerd to appreciate what Google's AlphaGo did to international Go champion Lee Sedol: a nerd that is both a Go nerd and a computer nerd. For Go nerdiness, I am recently enamored with the massively complex game that has exponentially more outcomes and dimensions than chess. As for the tech nerdiness, many of us assumed that after DeepBlue beat Kasparov in chess, any other game was a foregone conclusion. But actually, it's taken twenty years for a computer to rise to the level of top-ranked Go players, because high-level Go incorporates less calculation of a limited set of future outcomes and far more intuition. Challenges like this are not just an interesting competition.

The concept of inhuman intelligence goes back to the deep prehistory of mankind. At first the province of gods, demons, and spirits, it transferred seamlessly into the interlinked worlds of magic and technology. Ancient Greek myths had numerous robots, made variously by gods or human inventors, while extant artefacts like the Antikythera calendrical computer show that even in 200 BCE we could build machinery that usefully mimicked human intellectual abilities. There has been no age or civilisation without a popular concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Ours, however, is the first where the genuine article--machinery that comfortably exceeds our own thinking skills--is not only possible but achievable.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of deep learning -- the tech that helped Google's AlphaGo beat a master at Go -- said the most powerful machines are about a million times smarter than the human brain, and becoming more sophisticated each year. Hinton, who splits his time between working at Google and the University of Toronto, earned a PhD in AI from Edinburgh in 1978. While Google uses AI in its search engines to learn how to return smarter query results, Hinton predicts it still will take more than five years before machines possess human-level abilities. Start with search engines and move the technology into android-looking robotics. The robotics use many of the technologies required for smarter search engine queries, such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence. But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine--no less and no more.

Last year it was a Chinese speaking girlfriend and now it's an American teenage girl. Microsoft has launched its latest chat bot aimed at 18 to 24 year olds to improve their understanding of conversational language among young people online. Tay, like most teens, can be found hanging out on popular social sites and will engage users with witty, playful conversation, the firm claims. Microsoft has launched its latest chat bot aimed at 18 to 24 year olds to improve their understanding of conversational language among young people online. This chat bot is the brainchild of Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, and can be found interacting with users on Twitter, KIK and GroupMe.