Public perception of artificial intelligence technology, in 2017, seems to lie somewhere at the intersection of existential fear and cautious optimism. Yet there's a growing movement of people who believe AI is crucial to the evolution of our species. Ray Kurzweil, Google's guru of AI and futurism, spoke last week at the Council for Foreign Relations, in an intimate Q&A session. His views on the future of humanity might seem radical to a public that's been cutting its teeth on doomsayer headlines featuring Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning about World War III. He's quick to point out that today, right now, is the best our species has ever had it.

Nvidia reported a stellar quarter for the three months ended October 31. Nvidia had $2.6 billion in revenue in the quarter, and $1.5 billion of it came from graphics chips for gaming PCs. But the company's investment in artificial intelligence chips is paying off, with data center growing beyond $500 million in revenue for the first time. Jensen Huang, CEO of Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, said his company started investing in AI seven years ago, and that its latest AI chips are the result of years of work by several thousand engineers. That has given the company an edge in AI, and other rivals are scrambling to keep up, he said. I interviewed Huang on Thursday, after his company's earnings call, and we talked about everything from self-driving car predictions to cryptocurrency mining.

Facebook and Micron are among the favorite ways to play the boom in artificial intelligence, according to top technology analysts. The analysts were identified by looking at the average return of their recommendations and their success rate in those calls, as tracked by TipRanks, a Wall Street analyst database. Here are five favorite AI stocks recommended by the best-performing technology analysts. In 2017, Microsoft changed its strategy from a "mobile-first and cloud-first world" to "an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI." And this strategy shift seems to be paying off.

High-performance graphics chip pioneer NVidia reported better than expected fiscal Q3 earnings after the market close on Thursday. NVidia raised the dividend 7 percent to 15 cents a share and intends to return $1.25 billion to shareholders during the next fiscal year. NVidia consistently trumps analysts' expectations and comes just after Sony and gaming stocks Take Two Interactive $TTWO and Activision Blizzard $ATVI delivered strong earnings. NVIDA chips, graphics processors are gaming industry standouts for personal computers and video game consoles. Earnings: EPS $1.33 way ahead of analysts expected EPS of 94 cents on Revenue of $2.64 Billio beats expected 18% revenue growth to $2.36 billion.. "We had a great quarter across all of our growth drivers. Industries across the world are accelerating their adoption of AI." said CEO Jensen Huang in a statement What excites investors is earnings driven by strength across all product lines including, high-performance processors for data centers, artificial intelligence, digital currencies, machine learning and self-driving cars.

Today, Amazon and the Max Planck Society announced that they intend to enter into a strategic collaboration to promote research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon plans to build an Amazon Research Center adjacent to the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen. As part of the Cyber Valley initiative, the new center intends to bring together international key players from science and industry to concentrate their research activities in the field of AI. Amazon plans to invest 1.25 million Euro over the coming years to fund research groups in Tuebingen's Cyber Valley tech initiative. Cyber Valley was launched in December 2016 and focuses on AI research, such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision.

Though the world could probably use a few more machine learning experts, there are a lot of non-programming specialists whose expertise could directly benefit ML models. That's the thinking behind the startup Pienso, an MIT spin-off that its founders hope can make the process of training machine learning models more accessible to non-technical people and allow companies to call on their existing expertise to better the insights they receive. "How can we embed a domain expert who doesn't necessarily have machine learning experience and capture their expertise and use it?" is the question CEO Birago Jones says that Pienso answers. The Brooklyn-based startup announced today that it has closed $2.1 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund. The company is using this cash to grow the small team and start growing its customer base.

Difficult times for operators call for questioning old orthodoxies to win. For the better part of a decade, telecom companies have suffered through declining revenues, cash flow, and return on investment just as tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have mushroomed by building their businesses on the operators' own infrastructure. While these tech visionaries have enjoyed well over $1 trillion in combined market-cap growth by innovating and thinking differently and adeptly, telecom companies have tried to compete by implementing the same old survival tactics: cutting costs, reducing the workforce, and timidly entering into new business adjacencies. The trouble is that playbook no longer applies. It's time the telecom companies embrace this new reality and rethink the key orthodoxies that have shaped their industry since the first phone call was made about 140 years ago. If not, the alternative is dire.

Participants and startups in the emerging self-driving vehicles industry (components, systems, trucks, cars and buses) have been at it for over almost 60 years. The pace accelerated in 2004, 2005 and 2007 when DARPA sponsored long-distance competitions for driverless cars, and then again in 2009 when Uber began its ride-hailing system. As the prospects that self-driving ride-hailing fleets, vehicles, systems and associated AI would soon be a reality, startups, fundings, mergers and acquisitions have followed reaching a peak in 2017. Thus far in 2017 more than 55 companies and startups offering everything from solid state distancing sensors to ride-share fleets and mapping systems – plus five strategic acquisitions – raised over $28.2 billion! Listed below are month-by-month recaps of self-driving-related fundings and acquisitions as reported by The Robot Report.

Associate professor Tarek Taha will use the three-year, $44,000 award from the National Science Foundation to work toward his goal of developing an artificial intelligence chip. Taha says the chip will be more efficient and compact than current ones.

In Intel's financial third quarter reported Thursday, the chip giant made $16.1 billion in revenue on earnings of 94 cents per share, beating Wall Street estimates of $15.73 billion in revenue on earnings of 80 cents per share. The PC market continues to be a challenge for Intel. Growth in the company's PC unit was flat over the previous year with $8.9 billion in sales for the quarter. In addition to a slowing market, Intel faces a more competitive Advanced Micro Devices, which just launched its latest chips for laptop computers on Thursday. "We have earnings growth in a market with increasing competition," pointed out Intel CFO Bob Swan in an interview.