Consider: Facebook snapped up shopping search engine TheFind this spring and virtual reality startups Pebbles Interfaces and Surreal Vision last year, building on the social networking leader's 2014 purchase of Oculus VR. E-commerce giant Amazon nabbed cloud computing startups Amiato, 2lemetry, Elemental Technologies and Italy's Nice, as well as chipmaker Annapurna Labs, which brought it new data center technology. Google and its parent Alphabet acquired at least 15 small companies last year, many with mobile technologies. By the 1980s, many were dismantled. Some tech pundits fret that Google, Amazon and Facebook could stray too far from their core businesses as well.

For a while now, Google's company DeepMind has been working on an artificial intelligence (AI) which plays Atari games better than you remember your older brother playing them in the 1980s. The AI is not only extremely proficient at playing these cult classics but has also learned to play 49 of them completely on its own. Despite this impressive feat, the DeepMind's creation isn't perfect and some games have simply proved to be too complicated for it to learn them on its own, Montezuma's Revenge being one of them. However, the Google-owned company has recently been hard at work correcting the flaws in its AI which has finally mastered the unforgiving 1984 platformer developed by the now-defunct Utopia Software. As its developers explain it, they had to make the AI "curious enough" for it to want to actually win the game.

Imagine, a family vehicle that sounds like 16 lawnmowers. Flying cars are a forever icon of the future. Personal aircraft, with the ease and convenience of home automobiles, and without any of the downsides of airplanes or helicopters, have so far proven if not impossible then impractical, despite decades of attempts. But Google cofounder Larry Page isn't about to let all that history get in his way. The first, founded in 2010, is Zee.Aero.

We may soon have categorical evidence that living in San Francisco is a terrible idea. IBM announced on Nov. 20 that it had created an award-winning simulation of the Earth's tectonic plates that could soon be used to make predictions about when the next great earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will occur. And its artificial intelligence system, Watson, may prove to be the computer brain that can tell us when it's time to get out of the Bay Area. A team of computer scientists at IBM, in partnership with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, New York University and the California Institute for Technology, created a model that simulated the entire flow of mantle under the Earth's surface. The model is so complex that it had to run on the Sequoia supercomputer (the third-fastest computer in the world), which the company built for the US government.

A Sony PlayStation 4 console display is viewed in this Nov. 14, 2013 photo in a Best Buy store on the upper East Side of Manhattan, in New York. Sony has confirmed it is working on an upgraded PlayStation 4 capable of supporting 4K content. In an interview with The Financial Times, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Andrew House revealed the company is working on a high-end PS4 video game console available at a more expensive price than the current model. "It is intended to sit alongside and complement the standard PS4," said House. The console will not be revealed during next week's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

Complex financial information is hidden in plain sight all over the planet, according to James Crawford, CEO of Orbital Insight. The number of ships docked at a Malaysian port, even the color of a wheat field in western Nebraska, are actually signs, Crawford explained to me, visible indicators of economic activity, not just for a local region but for an entire global industry. Seen this way, mundane landscapes previously deemed unworthy of analysis can, in fact, be meticulously--and profitably--scrutinized. This newfound appreciation is not aesthetic, of course, but fiscal, as even the growing shadows of a Chinese construction site can be interpreted as valuable clues about the strength of the underlying economy. Crawford's company, Orbital Insight, is one of a new breed of market-research firms pioneering the use of high-resolution satellite imagery.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

Why not ask AI to do the job? Sunspring, a short film that debuted today on Ars Technica, displays many of the sci-fi tropes that fans of the genre know and love, from shiny metallic costumes to creepy biotechnology. There's just one difference: The nine-minute film was written by an artificially intelligent system named Benjamin, and, in a strangely satisfying way, it makes very little sense. Their banter, layered with an undertone of foreboding, is premised on the idea that "in a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." Benjamin ingested that prompt, which also serves as the film's opening line, and generated the brief script (plus some song lyrics, for good measure).

You already know that bots are one of the hottest topics since mobile apps. With major announcements from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, the bot craze has grown dramatically over just a few months. Well, that's exactly what I'm going to dive into with this post. Over the last couple months, my co-workers and I have been up to something that leverages a bot and have had many conversations with bot makers on this exact topic. So, here are seven business models that I expect bot makers to have the ability to leverage and redefine in the coming months.

The year 2015 proved to be crucial in the history of artificial intelligence (AI). It was the time when AI, which would so far fall in the category of sci-fi, went mainstream. The late John McCarthy, one of the founders of the discipline, foresaw the autonomous car as long back as the 60s. In April 2015, a car designed by Delphi Automotive became the first automated vehicle to complete a coast-to-coast journey across North America. In 2015,computer-aided diagnosis and treatment was first launched and is already being tried at 16 cancer institutes working with IBM's Watson Health artificial intelligence venture.