The Friday afternoon information dump, a grand custom noticed by politicians and capitalists alike, is often presupposed to disguise unhealthy information. So it was a little bit bizarre that Elon Musk, founder of electrical automotive maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new synthetic intelligence firm on the tail finish of a weeklong AI convention in Montreal this previous December. However there was a cause they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that nobody was wanting. It was that everybody was trying. When a few of Silicon Valley's strongest firms caught wind of the venture, they started providing great quantities of cash to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of synthetic intelligence researchers, intent on maintaining these huge thinkers for themselves. The last-minute gives--some made on the convention itself--have been massive sufficient to power Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the brand new startup.

The "rise of the machines" may not be so far after all as Hitachi appointed its first Artificial Intelligence manager back in September 2015. Isaac Asimov (Late American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University,) coined the term robotics in his 1950 classic I, Robot. The Japanese Multinational conglomerate enthroned a robot as a supervisor to induce more efficiency and productivity. The golem chief proved to be efficient, as 8% increase in efficiency was noticed. Lately, Airbus has announced the commencement of a program dedicated to the research and development of humanoid robotic technology to carry out intricate manufacturing errands in factories.

Tinder wants to help you go out and bring along some friends. The popular dating app is expanding beyond one-to-one matches and looking to connect groups. Called Tinder Social, the new feature lets users create a group of people that includes everyone's pictures and names -- pulled from users' Tinder profiles -- as well as a location of where you are interested in going for the night. The app then functions the same as one-to-one matching, where users can swipe and match with other nearby groups that are interested in a night out. Once you're matched, you can chat with everyone in the group.

Since the University of Amsterdam is slowly merging their science faculty with the one of the Free University(VU) (the other major uni of Amsterdam), some classes are given at VU. These tend to be easier, going less in-depth from what I heard and are more focused on knowledge representation and computational intelligence and symbolic AI in general. I believe two or so are mandatory to take.

The idea of enhancing an image digitally to reveal previously unseen levels of detail has become something of a sci-fi movie cliché. Now, astronomers at University College London have used a similar computer vision technique to learn more about the location of the missing Beagle 2 probe on the surface of Mars. A paper on the novel "stacking and matching" technique, which allows researchers to pick out objects at a resolution of up to five times greater than the original images, was published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in February. But just recently, the UCL researchers began using the technique, called Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR), to identify individual objects on the red planet's surface. "We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures," Jan-Peter Muller of UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory says in a press release.

BRUSSELS--Getty Images Inc., the world's largest photo agency, said Wednesday it has lodged an official complaint with the European Union's antitrust watchdog over Alphabet Inc.'s Google, accusing the U.S. technology giant of abusing its dominance in search to display copied images without compensation. The fresh complaint comes after the European Commission filed a new set of formal charges against Google last week for abusing its dominance with its Android mobile operating system to protect its search engine.

One of the advantages of running search workshops is that it forces me to keep up to date with changes and new developments. For many people, weird search results are something that they have to cope with but do not necessarily have time to investigate. They are providing information and support to other people, and once one project is over another takes its place. There is very little time to look into why the search engine - often Google - is behaving bizarrely. For me, keeping abreast of what the search engine companies are doing is a large chunk of my job and what I discover is sometimes disconcerting and worrying.

Nintendo has announced that it will launch its next generation games console -- called NX -- later this year ahead of the product going on sale in March 2017, as the Japanese gaming giant reports a huge fall in revenue. The company announced the NX news at the same time as it revealed that for the fiscal year ending March 31, its earnings plunged 60.6 percent to 16.5 million yen ( 148 million) on revenue of 4.53 billion, down 8 percent. The company has struggled to compete with the Xbox One from Microsoft and Sony's PlayStation 4, with the Wii U failing to replicate the huge success the company experienced with the original Wii. Nintendo failed to give any details about the new console, but quashed speculation about a reveal at the E3 gaming trade show in June, saying the company would be focusing on its new game "The Legend of Zelda" in Los Angeles. Not much is known about the Nintendo NX, with Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima telling Time earlier this year that the console would not simply be an update to its current model.

But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It's taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED, can do things traditional GUIs can't. Matt Hartman equates the surge in text-driven apps as a kind of "hidden homescreen". TechCrunch says "forget apps, now bots take over". The creator of Fin thinks it's a new paradigm all apps will move to. Dharmesh Shah wonders whether the rise of conversational UI will be the downfall of designers. Design, says Emmet Connolly at Intercom is a conversation. Benedict Evans prophecized that the new lay of the land is "all messaging expands until it includes software." "People don't want apps for every single business that you interact with," says David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, "…just have a message within a nicely designed bubble … [that's a] much nicer experience than an app." Under his charge, Facebook Messenger has tested this approach, building integrations with high profile partners as well as opening up a bot API. We've even seen avant-garde attempts at taking this idea to its extreme, like Quartz's latest app, which presents the news as a conversation, or the game Lifeline. Apps like Mailtime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them into chats. I guess I might be partially to blame for this, with a few pieces citing a section in a 2014 piece of mine that I literally titled "Chats as Universal UI."

A recent report predicts that a 100 million jobs could be at risk of being made redundant by automation. These are expected to include roles from supermarket cashier to accountant, as robotics and machine learning become increasingly able to perform routine tasks more efficiently than we can. But surely if there is one job title which will be safe from the inevitable rise of the machines it will be data scientist or big data analyst – after all haven't I been championing that career path as one with a bright future for some time now? And computers will always need a human to tell them what to do at some point, right? Sure a computer can learn, but won't it always need a human to teach it how - and tell it what - to learn?