Vicarious cofounder D. Scott Phoenix: "Artificial intelligence is the next major fundamental technology that will empower the world." Vicarious doesn't plan to have a product out next year. By the time Vicarious launches its first full product, it could be 2031. And that far-distant timeline doesn't seem to be putting off investors: already 70m has been put into the company from tech luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, despite the fact the company isn't registered as a for-profit. Taking 15 or 20 years to launch a product proper sounds an eternity in a Silicon Valley where fortunes rise and fall in the three months between quarterly results, but Vicarious isn't just working on any old product.

A computer program has beaten a master Go player 3-0 in a best-of-five competition, in what is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. Google's AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea. Lee Se-dol is one of the game's greatest modern players Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started. The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess. "AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability," one of Lee's former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.

We hear an awful lot about how artificial intelligence can be used to solve hard statistical challenges – but we hear much less about how it could solve emotional problems. But this field already has a name, affective computing, and one of its leading firms today is Affectiva. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The startup is a spinout of MIT's Media Lab, where researchers were working on ways to create new technologies that would enhance emotional communication and, yes, it already started offering'Emotion As A Service' late last year. The company has what is thought to be the world's largest database of emotions, gathered using facial recognition technology to analyze over 3.8 million faces from 75 countries and collating over 40 billion different data points.

Minecraft has had its share of real-world crossovers, but nothing quite like this. Norway's annual The Gathering tech conference is hosting a live concert both in real life and in Minecraft tonight at 9PM local time (4PM Eastern), with volunteers mimicking the artists in Minecraft as they parade around the stage. And this isn't a small production, either -- AlunaGeorge, Broiler and Lemaitre are on deck, so you should be in for a good time whether you're looking at the real artists or their blocky avatars.

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.

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.

Everyone just stop right now and check out Microsoft's new Tay chatbot, an "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill." If you have an account on Kik, GroupMe, or Twitter, you can begin interacting with Tay right now. "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," according to the Tay website. "The more you chat with Tay, the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you." Why this matters: The AI chatbot was designed by Microsoft's Research and Bing teams, which will use its interactions to develop greater understanding of natural conversation for its user base, presumably those who think Microsoft's Cortana is too old and staid to bother with.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

In 2012, a year which feels a lot like the very early years of the era of data, Wired published this article on Narrative Science, an organization based in Chicago that uses Machine Learning algorithms to write news articles. Its founder and CEO, Kris Hammond, is a man whose enthusiasm for algorithmic possibilities is unparalleled. When asked whether an algorithm would win a Pulitzer in the next 20 years he goes further, claiming that it could happen in the next 5 years. Hammond's excitement at what his organization is doing is not unwarranted. But his optimism certainly is. Unless 2017 is a particularly poor year for journalism and literary nonfiction, a Pulitzer for one of Narrative Science's algorithms looks unlikely to say the least.

Although the machine-learning discipline is more than 30 years old, the nascent technology is poised for a serious growth spurt that may put puberty to shame. "As machine learning becomes more mainstream and there's more understanding of how the technology works, I thing we will see exponential growth," said Drew Warren, president and CEO of smart-data processing vendor Recognos Financial. "As organizations' demand increases and grows more powerful, we see more organizations allotting more money to bring its development to the next level." Warren attributes machine learning's increased pace of evolution to better and more abundant enabling technologies, improved performance, and the rise of more specialized vendors that have the potential to reconfigure the technology's linear improvement curve into an exponential one. The advent of open-source resources like Google's TensorFlow machine-learning library has made development much easier, noted Nitin Rakesh, president and CEO of technology and knowledge-processing outsourcing provider Syntel.