Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of deep learning -- the tech that helped Google's AlphaGo beat a master at Go -- said the most powerful machines are about a million times smarter than the human brain, and becoming more sophisticated each year. Hinton, who splits his time between working at Google and the University of Toronto, earned a PhD in AI from Edinburgh in 1978. While Google uses AI in its search engines to learn how to return smarter query results, Hinton predicts it still will take more than five years before machines possess human-level abilities. Start with search engines and move the technology into android-looking robotics. The robotics use many of the technologies required for smarter search engine queries, such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Google is once again sharing its state-of-art artificial intelligence with the rest of the world. Today at an event in San Francisco, the company unveiled a new family of cloud computing services that allow any developer or business to use the machine learning technologies that power some of Google's most powerful services. Inside Google, these artificial intelligence systems deftly identify images inside apps like Google Photos; recognize commands spoken into Android Phones; and significantly improve the Google Internet search engine. Now others will be able to use them for many of the same purposes. During a lengthy keynote speech meant to highlight the company's entire suite of cloud services--services it sees as an enormously important part of its future--Google new application programming interfaces (APIs) for identifying images, recognizing speech, and translating from one language to another, among other services.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

Google will create business tools and products based on its own artificial intelligence technology, seeking to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services. The Alphabet Inc. unit plans to offer services such as audio transcription and image identification built around its machine-learning software. Google has used this technology for its own products, and is now making the capabilities available for other companies to rent and access over the Internet. The company also said it won several new large cloud customers, including the interactive division of Walt Disney Co. and Coca-Cola Co. Google is aiming to broaden the appeal of its cloud services to more corporate customers. Inc. get an early lead in the booming market, Google hired Silicon Valley legend Diane Greene to conjure a comeback.

Google's billionaire executive chairman Eric Schmidt (who describes himself as "a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google") says he's seen the future of wealth creation from the IT industry and its name is "machine learning." So he said during a keynote speech during Google's Cloud Computing Platform tech conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the next transformation," Schmidt says. "I'm a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google. But the programming paradigm is changing.

In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence. But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine--no less and no more.

Attention all 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S.: Tay is online now, and she wants to chat with you. That, at least, is according to a new Web page for the artificially intelligent bot, which was created by Microsoft to learn more about how people converse. The bot is now on hand to chat with you on Twitter as well as Kik and GroupMe; it's also on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The more you chat with it, the smarter it gets, Microsoft says, leading to a personalized experience. If you share information with Tay, the bot will track your nickname, gender, favorite food, ZIP code and relationship status. It may also use that data to search on your behalf or to create a simple profile for you.

The man who helped build Google from a search engine into one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world predicted the emergence of a new computing architecture based on crowd-sourced data and machine learning. Speaking at Google's GCP Next cloud computing conference in San Francisco On Wednesday, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said the combination of crowdsourced data and machine learning will be the basis of "every successful huge IPO" in five years. He said the adoption of machine learning will allow companies to mine crowdsourced data, which already provides a mass of information not previously available to companies, and improve on it. "You're going to use machine learning to take that data and do something that's better than what the humans are doing," he said. Schmidt said the wide adoption of machine learning in computing will be as significant as the switch from the web to smartphone apps, which spawned the success of companies like Uber and Snapchat.

Artificial intelligence is certainly no longer considered science fiction--or a source of expensive R&D efforts with unmet potential--by major players in the technology sector.1 Instead, we are in the midst of a real-world paradigm shift: the final stages of a decades-long transition from the scientific discipline known as artificial intelligence (and its various sub-disciplines) into an array of applied cognitive technologies made more widely available through innovative enterprise architectures unique to the business culture of the technology sector. The technology sector's interest in these technologies (figure 1)2 has exploded in the last several years. Networking companies, semiconductor manufacturers, hardware companies, IT providers, software providers, Internet players--just about every technology subsector has seen a substantial upsurge of activity in this space. In fact, the race to invest in artificial intelligence has been described as "the latest Silicon Valley arms race."3 Since 2012, there have been 100 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) within the technology sector involving cognitive technology companies, products, and services.4 And this rush of M&A activity is not the only sign of the industry's interest. Many capabilities that were only just emerging a few years ago are now essentially mature and becoming "democratized" and more readily available for business applications. As a result, leading companies are using cognitive technologies to enhance their existing products and services, as well as to open up new markets. What is interesting is that the assertive actions of the sector's leaders do not mirror the wholesale adoption of these technologies across the industry. Many technology sector companies have yet to turn their attention to how cognitive technologies are changing their sector or how they--or their competitors--may be able to implement these technologies in their strategy or operations.

Microsoft has created a new artificial intelligence chat bot that it claims will become smarter the more you talk to it. The bot, 'Tay', has been dubbed by its Microsoft and Bing creators as "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill!" The real-world aim of the bot is to allow researchers to "experiment" with conversational understanding, and learn how people really talk to each other. Naturally, for a bot that's available through Twitter and messaging platforms Kik and GroupMe, the AI is already filling the role of a millennial; emojis are included in its vocabulary, and it's explicitly aimed at 18-24-year-olds in the US, Microsoft says. The bot appears to have little practical function for users, but is capable of three different methods of communication: its website tay.ai boasts the AI can talk via text, play games (such as guessing the meaning of a string of emojis) and comment on photos sent to it.