The owner of a brand-new Tesla Model X SUV said the car suddenly accelerated at "maximum speed" by itself, jumped a curb and slammed into the side of a shopping mall while his wife was behind the wheel. The owner of the Model X, Puzant Ozbag, said the vehicle had been delivered only five days earlier to his home in Irvine, Calif., where the accident also took place. He said his wife had not activated any self-driving features at the time of the crash. "My wife is 45 years old and has had a driver's license almost 30 years and has a clean record. It's not like she's a 90-year-old person who's going to press the gas pedal instead of the brake," Ozbag said in an interview with Computerworld.

Chip startups come and go. Generally, we cover them because of novel architectures or potential for specific applications. But in some cases, like today, it is for those reasons and because of the people behind an effort to bring a new architecture into a crowded, and ultimately limited, landscape. With 100 million in "patience money" from a few individual investors who believe in the future of sparse matrix-based computing on low-power and reprogrammable devices, Austin-based Knupath, has spent a decade in stealth mode designing and fabricating a custom digital signal processor (DSP) chip to target deep learning training, machine learning-based analytics workloads, and naturally, signal processing. The company, led by famed NASA administrator Dan Goldin, has already fulfilled a 20 million contract for its first generation DSP-based system and has an interesting roadmap ahead, which will include the integration of FPGAs, among other devices.

"Alexa, ask Pebble how the Kickstarter campaign is doing." Today, we're very excited to announce that integrated Amazon Alexa support is coming Pebble Core! Core will be the first truly independent 3G wearable to give you the magic of Alexa on the go. Ask for your latest workout summary, catch up on current news, check the weather, or change your tunes--Alexa has you covered with its ever improving set of skills. Pebble Core streams music from Spotify, tracks your workouts with GPS, and now gives you the power of Alexa--all from the palm of your hand. Back the first truly connected ultra-wearable on Kickstarter, starting at 69.

In an interview with iTnews, Philip Scorgie, who joined Allens last month from Chicago-based Mayer Brown, said that he expects large Australian law firms to begin adopting cloud-based cognitive computing systems within the next year. But he believes predictions that'robot lawyers' will replace humans are overstated. He instead views cognitive computing as augmenting, rather than replacing, human capabilities, for example by assisting lawyers to handle large data volumes to produce structured documents. The CIO also said that nervousness around the access foreign governments might have to firms' sensitive client data has meant the legal sector has been hesitant to adopt cloud technologies, particularly in Australia and Europe. But he added that doing so carried a risk that in-house legal teams would do so and handle more work themselves.

Daniel Goldin has an impressive resume. The 75-year-old spent over a quarter century in the aerospace industry during the first leg of his career, went on to become the director of NASA and is now returning to the fold as the head of a newly launched startup. KnuEdge Inc., as the outfit is called, hit the scene today with a homegrown processor specifically designed to run machine learning algorithms. Dubbed KNUPATH, the chip sports 256 cores and 16 bidirectional I/O paths that provide 320 Gbs of throughput. It's also well-equipped to run in large environments, with the startup claiming that a single deployment can scale to over half a million nodes while keeping inter-rack latency at around 400 milliseconds.

There is a lot of buzz in the media right now about new electric vehicle (EV) company Faraday Future (FF). The startup seemingly came out of nowhere and is currently making a huge impact on the EV world. Even with significant press and social media attention, FF is still secretive about its upcoming EV projects. Auto-blog giant, Jalopnik, published an article about just how "mysterious" the EV startup is. The company's intrigue stems not only from its uniquely designed concept car, the FFZERO1, but also from its leaders' forward thinking mentality regarding technological advancement – especially artificial intelligence (AI) – something that the automotive industry has barely tapped into.

Google employees, squeezed onto metal risers and standing in the back of a meeting room, erupted in cheers as newly arrived executive Andrew Conrad announced they would try to turn science fiction into reality: The tech giant had formed a biotech venture to create a futuristic device like Star Trek's iconic "Tricorder" diagnostic wizard -- and use it to cure cancer. Conrad, recalled an employee who was present, displayed images on the room's big screens showing nanoparticles tracking down cancer cells in the bloodstream and flashing signals to a Fitbit-style wristband. He promised a working prototype of the cancer early-detection device within six months. That was three years ago. Recently departed employees said the prototype didn't work as hoped, and the Tricorder project is floundering. Tricorder is not the only misfire for Google's ambitious and extravagantly funded biotech venture, now named Verily Life Sciences. It has announced three signature projects meant to transform medicine, and a STAT examination found that all of them are plagued by serious, if not fatal, scientific shortcomings, even as Verily has vigorously promoted their promise.

You've probably seen a handful of amazing black hole images on the internet, like the one below. Or perhaps you've seen this illustration, which shows the immense mass of a black hole warping the space around it into a gravitational lens: And here's a view of a black hole belching particles near the speed of light -- also called relativistic jet or "blazar": No matter how awe-inspiring these images are, though, they're fantasy. We have no idea how the event horizon (or boundary) of a black hole might actually look to the human eye, since the gravity of black holes is so strong that not even light can escape. Black holes are also incredibly far away, and usually very compact. And we don't really know what happens as an object approaches an event horizon, or what, if anything, might be on the other side.

A major battle is brewing between four behemoths of the technology industry. You may not be aware of the fight, but the winner will have a major impact on your future. Apple kicked off this battle off when it introduced its voice assistant, Siri. IPhone users can use Siri to get information through a voice- and hands-free process. The underlining technology behind Siri is based on artificial intelligence algorithms, Natural Language Interfaces (NLI) and a form of machine learning.

Robots are coming for our jobs. These doom-laden predictions probably sound familiar to anyone who's read or seen any movies lately involving artificial intelligence. Sometimes they're invoked with genuine alarm, as in the case of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning against the danger of killer automatons. Other times, the anxiety comes across as a kind of detached, ironic humor masking the true depths of our dread, as if tweeting nervous jokes about #Skynet will somehow forestall its rise. AI raises unsettling questions about our place in the economy and society; even if by some miracle 99 percent of employers agree not to use robots to automate labor, that still leaves many hardworking people potentially in the lurch.