Secretive electric car company Faraday Future hopes to have its first vehicles rolling off the assembly line in 2018. The announcement was made as officials marked the start of construction on a planned 1 billion Las Vegas-area production plant, not far from rival Tesla's Gigafactory. While it's clear the company plans to create an electric car, a prototype has yet to be unveiled and there are no specifics yet on what kinds of cars it might manufacture. The company, backed by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, currently has about 700 employees in the U.S. It unveiled a concept car in January, but hasn't put a vehicle on the market. Faraday Future puts the size of the Apex Industrial Park facility at 3 million square feet, or nearly the size of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center close to the Las Vegas Strip.

It is the luxury speedboat that could leave you shaken, but not stirred. Luxury car maker Aston Martin, the supplier of James Bond's cars, has revealed the design for its first foray onto water. The firm hopes to produce a series of powerboats, which is boasts will be as luxurious and hi-tech as its cars. The AM37 yacht will enter production later this year, and will be launched in Monaco. There will be two captains chairs and a wrap-around bench set to accommodate 8 of your friends to take along for the journey.

There are companies out there working fast and furious to develop artificial intelligence in computers and what will that mean for our human society? Will developers develop themselves out of a job? Can computer artificial intelligence evoke human emotion and move people to buy products and services? If so, I am out of a job. In all seriousness, it will be interesting to see the applications and if it will be used to assist the human race, or to replace it.

The last time Microsoft released a "bot" onto the internet, it quickly became a Donald Trump-supporting, Nazi-sympathising, conspiracy theory-believing racist . It has unveiled a website called CaptionBo t, which uses clever algorithms to recognise images. Users are asked to give a star rating to reflect its accuracy, letting the bot learn from its mistakes and improve its skills. "I can understand the content of any image and I'll try to describe it as well as any human," the bot said. If you look at the tweets above, you'll see what happened to Tay, Microsoft's last creation. It was supposed to be a "chill" machine, but ended up getting tricked into spouting racist rhetoric, praising Hitler and calling for Mexico to build a wall to keep migrants out of the US.

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Chinese internet giant Alibaba has built artificial intelligence that it hopes will be able to correctly predict the outcome of reality TV talent show I'm a Singer. According to Tech in Asia, Alibaba's technology uses performance information such as "voice pitch and energy," and maps that against factors such as song choice and real-time audience response. The results will be shown online, pitching the technology, named'Ai', against the judges as the show is aired. The experiment is being held as a "proof-of-concept" for the technology, with Alibaba suggesting that it'll be used for purposes closer to its core business of online retail in the future. It's not the only internet company to be testing new technology on reality TV shows in Asia.

Of course, some of this is because Facebook was wise enough to seed its SDK to developers months in advance. But it's also because the company laid out its groundwork for bots in Messenger as early as last year. In 2015, Facebook unveiled its Messenger for Businesses program, which would allow consumers like you and me to talk with businesses on Messenger. You could chat with Hyatt to ask for more towels in your room or with Sprint to find out why your network was slow. Of course, you'd be speaking to a customer-support agent rather than a bot, but it was a starting point. On top of that, Facebook has been working with partners like Uber, Lyft and KLM to try out an early version of a bot system where you could request a car or book a flight through Messenger.

Intel is in transition right now: An executive shakeup this month laid the path for new boss Venkata Renduchintala to put his imprint on the company's PC, Internet of Things and software operations. So no wonder the vibe at this week's Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen was mellow. Intel kept the show a low-key affair, choosing not to bring it to the attention of a worldwide audience, unlike previous years. But IDF Shenzhen remains an important event on Intel's calendar. China is a huge market, and it's also a place where the chip maker encourages small hardware shops in the alleys of Shenzhen to experiment with PC, mobile and now, IoT ideas.

There has been some grumbling amongst industry folk who traveled to CinemaCon this year that studios aren't really showing anything new. In an age where fans clamor for teasers and trailers to debut earlier and earlier online, Hollywood has started giving sneak peeks of their films many months -- and sometimes years -- in advance of a movie's release. That wasn't the case with Universal Pictures, whose chairman Donna Langley told the crowd of movie theater owners gathered here on Wednesday that all material the studio would be sharing was "created specifically for CinemaCon." A majority of that material involved the studio's animated slate -- more on that here. But Universal also gave conference-goers a first glimpse at some of its most anticipated live-action releases.

Pop quiz: is the following statement true or false? Canada is the birthplace of a transformative technology set to disrupt countless industries and potentially lead the next wave of global economic growth. Most Canadians aren't aware of it, but artificial intelligence (more specifically its subset, deep learning) -- the inspiration for scores of dystopian science-fiction movies -- is a made-in-Canada technology that will become profoundly important over the next few years. Deep learning was the name given to a group of complex mathematical models that came out of the University of Toronto in 2006. In a nutshell, the technology mimics the neural networks of a human brain, giving machines the capacity to learn on their own and discover previously undetectable patterns within massive data sets.