A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, 'Bush did 9/11?-proclaiming Developers at Microsoft created'Tay', an AI modelled to speak'like a teen girl', in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as'The AI with zero chill' – and that she certainly is. To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe. She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being'creepy' or'super weird'.

The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft's Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.

If each atom in our universe were itself a universe, then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be about the same as the number of possible positions on the board in the ancient Chinese game of "Go." The game's complexity makes chess look like hopscotch. Until recently, the world's leading minds in artificial intelligence predicted that the world's smartest AIs--which have beat humans at chess by brute force for years now--were still a long, long way from "solving" Go. On March 12, a computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match against 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol and defeated him, 4-1, after Lee and other top professionals predicted he could win 5-0 or 4-1. AlphaGo, developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, has been awarded the rank of 9-dan, the highest possible professional Go ranking that takes human players decades to achieve.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Marketers use the word "handmade" to signal that a product is worth an extra couple bucks -- be it cheddar or loafer. But it's not just physical goods that are made more quickly and cheaply by machine. Artificial intelligence is making decisions that would previously be done by humans. In a new post, Fast Company's Sarah Kessler reports on the on-demand concierge startup GoButler, which just went from having humans handle requests to solely relying on algorithms. "My general view is that people will always want convenience, but they're not willing to pay premiums for it," says GoButler CEO Navid Hadzaad.

Microsoft has taken its AI chatbot Tay offline after machine learning taught the software agent to parrot hate speech. Tay, introduced on Wednesday as a conversational companion for 18 to 24 year-olds with mobile devices, turned out to be a more astute student of human nature than its programmers anticipated. Less than a day after the bot's debut it endorsed Hitler, a validation of Godwin's law that ought to have been foreseen. Engineers from Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams created Tay as an experiment in conversational understanding. The bot was designed to learn from user input and user social media profiles.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automationBig Performance from Low-Power Hardware. Read more ... » moonshot like the selfWhen is CES 2016, what will be the best gadgets and how much are ticket prices?. Read more ... »-driving car challenges of the earlyHome IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applicationsNvidia Releases Machine Learning Products for Hyperscale Datacenters. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape.

Microsoft has blamed a "co-ordinated attack" by Twitter users for the racist and other offensive comments spouted by an automatedBillionaire Says Smarter Tech Will Destroy Jobs At a Record Clip. Read more ... » chatbot it released on the social networkMicrosoft's HoloLens award recipients, Instagram client pulled from iOS store,…. The claim came as the softwareMicrosoft Integrates Cortana, Power BI. Read more ... » company was forced into a strenuous apology for the tweets sent out by its artificialMicrosoft and I can see that this blog post displeases you. Read more ... » characterHow Imperson Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Bring Miss Piggy To Life. Read more ... », called Tay.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted). Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014.

IN 1996 IBM challenged Garry Kasparov to a game of chess against one of its computers, Deep Blue. Mr Kasparov, regarded as one of the best-ever players, won--but Deep Blue won the rematch. Two decades on, computers are much better than humans at chess but remain amateurs when it comes to the much tougher, ancient game of Go. Or at least, they did. Now a computer has managed to thrash a top-drawer human player.