Facebook just released new tools that will let any business build "smart" chatbots that users can interact with and even purchase things from while using the Messenger app. But what about Facebook's own super-smart virtual assistant, M? The bot, which Facebook first introduced to the world in the Fall, got few on-stage mentions during the company's F8 developer conference on Tuesday. And the third-party chatbots that Facebook now wants outside businesses to create might seem to obviate the need for Facebook to maintain its own bot. But Facebook told Business Insider that the company has not given up on M, even if the bot is still "a long way" from being broadly released. Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for messaging at Facebook, assures Business Insider that the company does still foresee M as being its own product.

I'd seen everything that Grindr had to offer and was growing weary of unsolicited dick pics and random old balls. So I turned to Tinder and had a couple failed dates. The first was a disgruntled state worker who wore Tom's, winced when I told him I had two pitbulls and spent the better part of two hours mansplaining ethics to me. The next was a waifish first-year English teacher and self-professed INFJ who, curiously, didn't do a lot of reading due to his workload. I powered through, reminded of months of success, but couldn't help thinking of my failure.

Getting a robot to balance and walk on two feet is a massive challenge, as the DARPA Challenge revealed. But it turns out it's a little less tricky when you focus on just the legs, as the Alphabet-owned SCHAFT's newest bipedal creation demonstrated by confidently walking out on stage at the New Economic Summit going on in Tokyo. Until it's revealed outside of the conference, we'll have to settle with shaky smartphone footage of the demo reel SCHAFT played during its presentation. But the video shows the lab's development of its latest bipedal robot, including the impressive progress it's made when it comes to dealing with uneven terrain, and random obstacles that would easily trip up other walking bots. Details on what the new SCHAFT robot is capable of are slim at the moment, but apparently it's designed to be low-cost and low-power.

Useless robot waiters are being blamed for the closure of several restaurants in China, after an investment by the owners in automated serving staff turned out to be a financial disaster. According to a translated report in the Worker's Daily -- which might have good reason to undermine robot labour, so perhaps be a bit cynical about it -- a restaurant chain has closed two branches staffed in part by 7,000 ( 4,900) robot servants, with a third surviving the cut; but replacing the underperforming automatons with rubbish old last-generation human service staff. Despite what we may have been told by the pro-robot agenda being pushed by the media, staff weren't impressed, telling the paper: "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again." Which is odd, as they seem to be able to weld cars together and put windscreens into them by themselves, surely harder tasks than giving a man a cup of tea?

In late 2015 Toyota proclaimed a five-year project investing 1 billion in artificial intelligence and robotics research with the establishment of Toyota Research Institute (TRI) facilities at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The fields of study are artificial intelligence, autonomous transportation, and mobile indoor robotics. Gil Pratt, CEO of TRI as well as an MIT alum and a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), laid out two tracks for autonomous vehicle research: one for "chauffeur model" wholly autonomous cars, one for "guardian angel" systems that would create more helpful, "intelligent" but traditional cars. A guardian angel, like a fearless driving instructor with a mirrored set of controls in the passenger's seat, would only take over if it determines an incident is imminent. Seen as a mid-term step ahead of the fully autonomous cars Toyota is also working on – and Google, Uber, Ford, and Volvo – the introduction of advanced AI monitoring systems could see production before self-driving cars since the human remains in charge more than 99 percent of the time.

Seismic launched their own collaboration platform called Workspace and claim to be "the only sales enablement platform with every essential capability in place now." The new cloud forum enables enterprise users to collectively gather, share and access content and add comments, annotations, feedback and commentary to their sales content. Amazon acquisition of deep learning startup Orbeus Inc, underlining their efforts to apply AI based deep learning techniques in their delivery systems and cloud computing business. Orbeus has developed a photo recognition technology based on neural networks named ReKognition. Conversocial, a social customer care platform launched its Channel API and announced initial integration partnerships with social Intelligence, monitoring and analytics companies Synthesio and Brandwatch.

Facebook Messenger users will be able to talk with automated bots using a new set of developer tools, the social networking company announced Tuesday during its F8 conference in San Francisco. The new Messenger Platform Send/Receive API will let developers build bots that can converse with users and do things like let them purchase items and get the latest news. It gives developers a set of user interface tools that will allow them to create buttons inside a Messenger conversation that guides users on what a bot can do, along with handling text conversation. The tools are available in beta to developers Tuesday, with companies like shopping app Spring, CNN, and weather bot Poncho providing Facebook bots to users at launch. The news comes just weeks after Microsoft devoted a large chunk of its Build developer conference keynote to what its executives called "conversations as a platform." The company released a free toolkit to help developers make bots that work across a variety of platforms, including Messenger competitors GroupMe and Telegram.

Jon Barker: Jon Barker is a Solution Architect with NVIDIA, helping customers and partners develop applications of GPU-accelerated machine learning and data analytics to solve defense and national security problems. He is particularly focused on applications of the rapidly developing field of deep learning. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Jon spent almost a decade as a government research scientist within the U.K. Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Department of Defense R&D communities. While in government service, he led R&D projects in sensor data fusion, big data analytics, and machine learning for multi-modal sensor data to support military situational awareness and aid decision making. He has a Ph.D. and B.Sc. in Pure Mathematics from the University of Southampton, U.K.

This week, in Geneva, Indian diplomats are closely monitoring an international expert review of the legal implications of the so-called "lethal autonomous weapons". These weapons will have the capability of selecting and engaging targets on their own. Although fully autonomous weapons are yet to register significant presence in the arsenal of any nation, many consider their development and deployment inevitable in the coming years. Rapid advances in robotics, machine-learning and big-data analytics are at once driving the so-called "fourth industrial revolution" and the transformation of modern warfare. How the leading powers mobilise and deploy these technologies will shape the balance of economic and military power among them in the coming decades.

Emerald Medical Applications Corp. (OTCQB: MRLA), an Israeli-based company engaged in the development and sale of its proprietary DermaCompare cloud-based, artificial intelligence technology for the early diagnosis of Melanoma/skin cancer, today announced entry into a cooperation agreement with Terem, one of Israel's largest community-based, emergency healthcare providers with 17 medical facilities, serving over 700,000 patients throughout Israel. Starting in April 2016, Emerald will begin to offer its DermaCompare technology at each of Terem's clinics throughout Israel, offering advanced dermatological examinations, diagnosisand treatment led by a leading professional Dermatologists. DermaCompare is Emerald's cloud-based, artificial, intelligence technology using Total Body Photography imaging which is capable of being automatically compared to a patient's previous images to diagnose and detect the presence of Melanoma in its earliest stages. Lior Wayn, Emerald's CEO, stated that "DermaCompare, Emerald's FDA approved, HIPPA compliant software technology, which can be downloaded from any Mac or Android based App store, enables physicians andtheir patients, using virtually any digital camera, including cell phones, iPads, tablets and other similar devices, to take Total Body Photography images and, in real-time, transmit these images for dermatological evaluation and identification of suspicious moles, lesions and other skin conditions. These images are then compared using Emerald's cloud database, as well as the patients previous Total Body Photography images, which will dramatically enhance a physician's ability to detect Melanoma earlier, more accurately and more efficient than other means of diagnosis."