After winning its three-game match against Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie, the world's top Go player, AlphaGo is retiring. Demis Hassabis, the CEO and founder of DeepMind, the Google artificial intelligence lab that built this historic machine, tells WIRED he will now move the machine's designers to other projects. "This is some of the top people in the company," Hassabis says. "The idea is to really explore what we can do in other domains." Considering the world-shaking success of AlphaGo, that is a very powerful idea.

Inflowz, an artificial intelligence process optimization company, raised $3.5 million in seed funding from Glilot Capital Partners. The investor is a venture capital fund that specializes in enterprise software. Founded in 2017, the company aims to help sales leaders optimize their processes with an artificial intelligence technology platform. The technology generates a visual display of various sales journeys, and creates dynamic recommendations for optimization and maximization of revenue throughout the sales process. Inflowz says it will use the funds to expand its current Tel Aviv-based team of 10 with engineering, Machine Learning, and AI professionals.

Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established. Instead, he went to China. "You couldn't have started a lab like mine elsewhere," Mr. Schwertfeger said. The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West invented the software and the chips powering today's digital age, has become a major player in artificial intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future.

Humanity's contest with artificial intelligence, using the oldest and most complicated form of competition known to the human mind, came down convincingly in the machine's favour this week, firmly marking a point in time when the progeny of the human race outsmarted the creator's own ingenuity. AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (AI) programme developed in 2014 by the DeepMind lab of the world's largest internet search engine Google, vanquished China's Ke Jie, the top player of the game of Go in all three matches this week in Wuzhen in Zhejiang province. The game of Go, also known as weiqi (圍棋), is played on a 19 X 19 grid board by two players. With more permutations and possible moves than the total number of estimated atoms in the visible universe, it has been used as the benchmark for measuring human intelligence against the artificial variety. Computer scientists and futurists had predicted that AI would need at least a decade before it can beat humans at Go. AlphaGo's 3-0 victories this week have brought forward that timeline significantly.

The world's No.1 weiqi (Go) player Ke Jie lost the contest against his artificial intelligence (AI) rival, AlphaGo, in the third and also final match of the summit on Saturday. This match began at 10:30 BJT in Wuzhen, east China's Zhejiang Province, with AlphaGo playing the black and Ke white. Ke showed his brilliant weiqi skills as he said he will "fight till the end," though he lost his previous two matches against AlphaGo on Tuesday and Thursday. AlphaGo made the first "impolite" move as it did on Thursday – to put the black stone on the bottom-right corner of the weiqi board. It is a Chinese tradition that the first stone is usually placed around the top-right corner and this is what weiqi coaches always teach beginners.

New Delhi, As artificial intelligence (AI)-powered smart devices and solutions gather momentum globally amid fears of "bots" taking over jobs soon, a top Adobe executive has allayed such fears, saying AI will actually assist people intelligently. "Saying AI will take over the creativity of humans is not right. It will take away a lot of stuff that you have to do in a mundane way. A human mind is a lot more creative than a machine," Shanmugh Natarajan, Executive Director and Vice President (Products) at Adobe, told IANS in an interview. "With AI, we are trying to make the work easier.

Human champion Ke Jie competes against AlphaGo at the Future of Go Summit. Two days ago in the Zhejiang Province of China, Google's Go-playing artificial intelligence AlphaGo bested current world Go champion Ke Jie in the first game of a three-part match, sliding by on a half-point victory. Now the second game has taken place -- and once again, AlphaGo has emerged the winner. The human gave it his all. "Incredible," wrote DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis on Twitter while the match was underway.

We're pretty much half way through the year, which means it's Computex time. As usual, you'll find a handful of us running around the Taipei show floors next week, where we'll be getting our hands dirty with the latest PC products and components. Last year was relatively fruitful thanks to the VR explosion. Several PC brands rolled out high-end GPUs or affordable ones capable of running VR. Even Intel surprised its hardcore users with its first-ever 10-core desktop CPU.

The day Thore Graepel joined Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab in the spring of 2015, his new colleagues sat him down for a game of Go. Over the previous year, they'd trained a neural network to play the ancient game. Graepel happened to be a player himself, holding a one dan rank, the Go equivalent of a black belt. As the game began with DeepMind researchers circled around him, Graepel was confident he would win. After all, he never had trouble playing other Go programs.

The silence was shredded by the rat-tat-tat eruptions of a single gun. More soldiers fired, their volleys coalescing into the grim music of war -- a sustained snare drum roll soon interrupted by the bass thumps of the 50-caliber machine gun. All the barrels pointed at a speck tracing a line in the sky over west Mosul. Their target was yet another drone dispatched by Islamic State. In the seven months of the Iraqi government's drive to recapture Mosul from the jihadists, small drones have become a signature tactic of the group: Their appearance on the horizon, loaded with a camera, signals that punishing mortar barrages will soon be on the way.