Amazon is on the hunt for as much as 1 million square feet of office space in Boston, adding a new level of intrigue to the retail giant's plans as it whittles down the list of the cities competing for its second headquarters. The Seattle company is negotiating with a Seaport developer to lease an entire office building, and possibly two, to continue its expansion in the city, according to real estate industry executives with knowledge of the talks. Amazon employs more than 1,000 people in Boston and Cambridge -- mostly software engineers and developers -- with offices open or under construction in Kendall Square, the Back Bay, and Fort Point. It expects to nearly double that number over the next few years, and could grow even larger here with more space in the Seaport. Amazon's Seaport search reportedly began months before the company announced in September that it wants to build a second headquarters -- envisioned as a vast campus big enough for 50,000 workers -- and before Boston emerged as a top contender for that project.

A revolution, it is said, is not an apple that simply falls when it is ripe. You have to make it drop. As AI moves beyond proof-of-concept and sandbox implementation, businesses are looking to recruit top machine learning talent, cultivate AI skills across their workforce, and begin to use this amazing set of technologies for incredible outcomes in 2018. There's still not enough AI experts out there to make this a reality – and a huge AI skills gap is opening up as a result. Last year, 56% of senior AI professionals argued in a recent Ernst & Young poll that the lack of talent and qualified workers is the greatest single barrier to the implementation of AI across business operations.

Landmark action-adventure game Dark Souls is being remastered for Nintendo's Switch console, the company announced today. The game was shown alongside a number of other new versions of older games for Switch, including cult hit The World Ends With You, Super Nintendo classic Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze and Hyrule Warriors. Dark Souls, an intricate and arcane work of dark fantasy pits players against a world of demonic creatures, is widely regarded as one of the best video games of all time. First released in late 2011, it took an influential approach to video game storytelling, letting its community of players piece together its backstory over the course of several years from well-hidden and often ambiguous hints hidden within the game world. Players could also appear in each others' games to either help or hinder each others' progress, maintaining a community of dedicated players that is still active seven years later. Its publisher Bandai Namco estimates that it and its two sequels have sold more then 9 million copies.

On the heels of billions of yuan of investment burrowed into China's artificial intelligence scene, China's state news agency has announced that it is rebuilding its newsroom to emphasize human-machine collaboration. There are already elements of this in quite a few newsrooms but this is the first announcement (I've seen) of a large news org rearranging itself around AI…. https://t.co/oK7pZbj158 Xinhua News Agency president Cai Mingzhao said Xinhua will build a "new kind of newsroom based on information technology and featuring human-machine collaboration." The agency has also introduced the "Media Brain" platform to integrate cloud computing, the Internet of Things, AI and more into news production, with potential applications "from finding leads, to news gathering, editing, distribution and finally feedback analysis." The agency's announcement was sparse on details, but it's the latest component of a deep push into AI by China.

The automobile is entering an important period of changes. As proof, at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Hyundai is displaying a vehicle boasting three solutions that all have a chance to become reality within the next few years. That vehicle is called NEXO. First of all, a technology that should still need some time before becoming widely available in Canada, fuel cells. Hyundai, who already showed off the Tucson FCEV in various auto shows and set up a pilot project in British Columbia, has announced that it has enhanced this technology.

TD Bank Group has announced the acquisition of Layer 6 Inc. ("Layer 6"), a world-renowned artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Toronto, Ontario. Layer 6 has emerged as a global thought-leader and pioneer in the delivery of responsive, personalized and insight-driven experiences for the financial services industry. Layer 6 founders Tomi Poutanen and Jordan Jacobs are also co-founders of the Vector Institute, a world leader in AI research and education that TD also supports. "Anticipating and meeting customer needs are at the heart of our promise, and we are excited to further accelerate our innovation agenda to deliver well into the future. As we deploy new solutions, we will extend our deep relationship with customers across all of our platforms and offer personalized, connected and legendary experiences for our customers in the digital age."

Natural products are organic biomolecules produced by nature and, particularly those produced by microbiota, represent a rich source of evolutionarily optimized biologically active molecules. The Adapsyn platform combines genomic and metabolomic data with artificial intelligence and machine-learning to identify novel, mechanistically diverse evolved small molecules from human and environmental microbiomes. The financing will support the company's internal drug development programs. "We are excited to apply our platform to unlock the unique targeting capacity of these evolved compounds and realize new therapeutics," commented Nathan Magarvey, PhD, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Adapsyn. "Recent technological advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large-scale genomic and metabolomic analysis are reenergizing the field of natural product drug development, and Adapsyn is excited to be at the forefront of this work."

TORONTO, Jan. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ – TD Bank Group (TD) (TSX and NYSE: TD) today announced the acquisition of Layer 6 Inc. ("Layer 6"), a world-renowned artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Toronto, Ontario. Layer 6 has emerged as a global thought-leader and pioneer in the delivery of responsive, personalized and insight-driven experiences for the financial services industry. Layer 6 founders Tomi Poutanen and Jordan Jacobs are also co-founders of the Vector Institute, a world leader in AI research and education that TD also supports. "Anticipating and meeting customer needs are at the heart of our promise, and we are excited to further accelerate our innovation agenda to deliver well into the future. As we deploy new solutions, we will extend our deep relationship with customers across all of our platforms and offer personalized, connected and legendary experiences for our customers in the digital age."

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An AI-powered robot dog created by Sony has ignored commands from the firm's CEO onstage in an embarrassing moment for the electronics giant. The £1,300 ($1,750) Aibo robot, which Sony says behaves like a real dog and responds to voice commands, was on show at a conference in Las Vegas on Monday. 'Aibo is an autonomous robot and will quickly become a member of your family, right Aibo?' Sony's President & CEO Kazuo Hirai said in an exchange on stage. But the robo-dog didn't respond, prompting Hirai to remark, 'ignored me there' before quickly passing Aibo back to its handlers. An AI-powered robot dog created by Sony has ignored commands from the firm's CEO onstage in an embarrassing moment for the electronics giant.