Microsoft's attempt to engage millennials via an artificially intelligent "chatbot" called Tay has failed miserably after trolls made the bot spew offensive comments. The brainchild of Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, Tay was designed to engage and entertain people when they connect with each other online. Targeted at 18 to 24-year olds in the U.S., Tay aimed to use casual and playful conversation via Twitter and messaging services Kik and GroupMe. "The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you," explained Microsoft, in a recent online post. The Internet, however, can be an unpleasant place and Twitter trolls were quick to pounce on the TayTweets account after the chatbot launched on Wednesday.

Things went from cute to Godwin in about a day. Jana Eggers has observed that AI is our progeny; rather than demonize or glorify it, we should be like responsible parents, and decide how we want our offspring to be raised. This is a real problem for machine learning algorithms. We train them on a corpus, or body of knowledge. We want them to be big and varied so we don't overfit the algorithm to a limited data set.

Google may be looking to end their involvement with robots and artificial intelligence, but that's hardly stopping Amazon. The e-commerce more retailer recently held a top secret conference for robot experts and space explorers. There were even lightsabers involved. This past week, in the lovely town of Palm Springs, California, a top secret meeting took place. This invite-only conference included experts in artificial intelligence, robotics and space exploration.

Tiff Macklem is dean of the Rotman School of Management and former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada. Ajay Agrawal is the Peter Munk professor of entrepreneurship and professor of strategic management at the Rotman School and founding academic director of its Creative Destruction Lab. Scott Bonham is co-founder of GGV Capital and co-chair of the C100, a non-profit organization of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, executives and investors in Silicon Valley. Productivity growth is essential for improving a country's standard of living. Unfortunately, Canada's productivity growth chronically underperforms.

In less than 24 hours, Microsoft's artificial intelligence project modeled after an American teenage girl went from making awkward conversation in broken syntax to spewing hateful, fully formed tweets laden with racial slurs. But as startling as the offensive tweets were, the incident shows how quickly online conversations turn fetid when diversity isn't a factor. Tay, programmed as a 19 year old, was created as a machine learning project meant interact with peers between 18 and 24 years old. Users can play games with her, trade pictures, tell stories, and ping her for late-night chats. That last activity went awry Thursday when the chatbot began regurgitating inappropriate messages that skewed anti-semitic, used the n-word, and condemned feminism.

We were intrigued yesterday when Microsoft Technology introduced the world to Tay -- we even had a conversation with her about the super creepy, super awesome film, "Ex Machina" (we think she was lying to us about having watched it). Unfortunately, she became colored by the subjective input she received from the glorious population of internet trolls and was taken offline temporarily while Microsoft makes "adjustments" to make her less, well, mean. We can't tell you our secret sauce, but we can share with you ZeroBot's increasing ability to objectively understand the data it's being shown. Even up until a few weeks ago, we were still manually tagging the stories ZeroBot automatically creates. It was the last bit of human touch we were including in its storybuilding process, and we were eager to get rid of every last vestige of it. Last week, our CMO Masha (you can read more about her here) got rid of our need to tag and turned ZeroBot loose to do its thang.

Microsoft created an artificial-intelligence based chatbot named Tay to engage with young people on Twitter. But within hours of her debut Wednesday, the Internet had stolen the bot's innocence. The bot, @TayandYou, rapidly transformed into a racist that hates feminists, supports Donald Trump for President and considers herself a fan of Hitler. The metamorphosis from happy bot to enraged racist came lightning-fast, much like the way many things go in the instantaneous virtual world in which Tay was born. "Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in 24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

In machine learning, these statements are called forks, and they split the data into two branches based on some value. That value between the branches is called a split point. Homes to the left of that point get categorized in one way, while those to the right are categorized in another. A split point is the decision tree's version of a boundary. Picking a split point has tradeoffs. Our initial split ( 240 ft) incorrectly classifies some San Francisco homes as New York ones.

A company that helps users to create their own websites now knows what kind of sites their 80 million users are building without pestering them with repeated questions. Wix, a Tel Aviv-based web development company, is using machine learning on Google's cloud platform to learn more about its users so it can help them find the images they need to build interesting and useful websites. That's just the beginning of how machine learning will be used in the cloud, according to industry analysts who say machine learning will be the biggest thing that's ever hit the cloud. David Zuckerman, head of developer experience for Wix, said machine learning in the cloud will be a boon to companies that don't have a major research division. "The cloud has brought this technology to everyone," he said.

The Google Photos app allows users to back up their photos from multiple devices in a single location, while also collecting pictures of the same people or objects into organized groups. Now, it will do those tasks fully automatically, creating an album that collects photos taken during a specific period -- such as a vacation -- organized into an album of showing the "best" photos from the trip. Those photos will also be tagged with well-known landmarks they depict and people that appear frequently, along together with a Google map that roughly depicts your journey. "It'll also add maps to show how far you traveled and location pins to remember where you went--because it's not always easy to recall the late-night diner you hit on your road trip, or which campsite you pitched the tent in when arriving after dark," the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. After that, the albums can be further customized, with photos removed from the album, added captions or locations on the map.