Salesforce has spent over 4 billion on acquisitions in the past year alone, and it's making some investors grow concerned about the company's spending strategy. According to a note by Macquarie Research on Tuesday, Salesforce may have some explaining to do during its earnings call on Wednesday to ease the investors worried about the company's record-high buying spree over the past year. That includes the 2.8 billion Demandware acquisition, which was the largest deal Salesforce has made to date, and the 750 million deal for the 40-person startup Quip. Still, Piper Jaffray noted that most of the acquisitions make sense because they've been in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space, in which Salesforce is launching its new product Einstein.

Sonos today announced an integration that's just shy of wonderful, but still pretty fun: You'll soon be able to control everyone's favorite connected speakers from the comfort of your Amazon Echo. Today, Sonos announced two new ways to control its system via third-party wares. First, you'll soon be able to fire up Spotify, select your Sonos in the devices menu, and control the speakers directly from the app. That trick is not quite available yet, but it's coming as a free Echo device update in 2017.

However, if fraud occurs in small distant purchases and in large local ones, as in Figure 1, the task of classification is too complex. Interest in the approach faded for a while, but at the end of the 1970s people worked out how to tackle more complex classification tasks using networks of artificial neurons arranged in layers, so that the outputs of one layer formed the inputs of the next. The difficult part of all this is that the network has to identify the concepts to be captured in the hidden middle layer on the basis of information about how changing the weights on the links between the middle and output layers affects the final classification of transactions as fraud or bona fide. The problem is solved by computing a measure of how a change in the final set of weights changes the rate of errors in the classification and then propagating that measure backwards through the network.

However, the real risk posed by AI – at least in the near term – is much more insidious. The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, launched this week with 5.5m in funding from the Open Philanthropy Project, is lead by computer science professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Stuart Russell. "The potential benefits [of AI research] are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable," the letter reads. Similarly, an artificially intelligent hedge fund designed to maximize the value of its portfolio could be incentivized to short consumer stocks, buy long on defence stocks and then start a war – as suggested by Elon Musk in Werner Herzog's latest documentary.

WASHINGTON – Federal aviation officials estimate there will be 600,000 commercial drone aircraft operating in the U.S. within the year as the result of new safety rules that opened the skies to them on Monday. Michael Huerta, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said at a news conference that the rules governing the operation of small commercial drones are designed to protect safety without stifling innovation. Commercial operators initially complained that the new rules would be too rigid. The agency responded by creating a system to grant exemptions to the rules for companies that show they can operate safely.

Earlier this summer, humans submitted their selfies and computer scientists submitted their algorithms to be competitors and judges in the first beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence. The six AI judges were trained to evaluate wrinkles, face symmetry, skin color and several other parameters before choosing men and women winners in various age groups ranging from 18 to 69. A total of 60,000 people submitted their selfies, and the winners have been chosen. It actually stemmed from a project that involves using AI to evaluate health and hopefully slow aging in the future.

A new speech recognition system can transcribe English or Mandarin about three times faster than humans can type on a smartphone, according to a recent study. SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg's First Stop in China: Baidu Headquarters The study, a collaboration between Stanford University, Baidu and the University of Washington, also found that the system produced 20.4 percent fewer errors than people typing in English and 63.8 percent fewer than people working in Mandarin. "We're putting speech recognition up against people who are really good at this task," study co-author James Landay told Stanford News. The system produced 20.4 percent fewer errors than people typing in English and 63.8 percent fewer than people working in Mandarin.

New Zealand fixed-line telecommunications provider Chorus has announced its full-year financial results for 2015-16, reporting earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) of NZ 594 million, down by NZ 8 million due to the regulator's copper pricing decision in December. In December, the New Zealand Commerce Commission released its final pricing determination for broadband services being delivered over Chorus' legacy copper network. A breakdown of revenue saw basic copper services contribute NZ 489 million, NZ 2 million less than last year; enhanced copper contribute NZ 242 million, down from NZ 268 million; and fibre contribute NZ 133 million, up by 35.7 percent year on year from NZ 98 million. Value Added Network Services, Field Services, and Infrastructure were all down by NZ 1 million to contribute NZ 35 million, NZ 83 million, and NZ 20 million, respectively.

Google announced last week it was adding two new engines, CrowdStrike and Invincea, to its malware scanning platform VirusTotal. Google limited access to the full VirusTotal API only for companies that had a product listed in its scanning service. The company said that any vendor can integrate its product in VirusTotal, and be granted access to the full API if they provided data back to the community, and join the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO). A day later, Invincea announced it was joining AMTSO and VirusTotal as well.

Tech giants including Google, Twitter, Salesforce, Apple, Intel, Yahoo, IBM, and AOL bought nearly 30 AI startups in the last five years, according to CB Insights. Venture capital (VC) interest in AI boomed in recent years as well. The boom started two year ago as "2014 marked a banner year for VC investment in U.S.-based AI startups, with capital invested and deal count increasing year-on-year by 183 percent and 41 percent, respectively," stated a report by PitchBook, an M&A database. According to an analysis done by his firm, Magister Advisors, the median price paid to AI startups per employee is 2.4 million.