There's a big difference between what a person wants and what they need. On one hand we need healthy food, a good night's rest, and decent medical care. But a little voice inside our heads has us craving dinner at Gordon Ramsay's, an overnight stay at the Ritz Carlton, and a spa weekend at the St. Regis in Aspen to fix whatever is wrong. The same is true with countries. There's a big difference between what a country wants and what it needs.

On Wednesday, when Microsoft had a much rosier view of humanity than it does now, the software giant released a "Millennial chatbot" to Twitter named Tay. She was supposed to mimic 18-to-24-year-olds, learn from her interactions, and develop a personality like her peers over time. This went exactly how you would've expected it to. Like most 19-year-olds on Twitter for 24 hours with no supervision, Tay had become a white supremacist Holocaust denier who believes that "Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler." Microsoft had to take the thing behind the server racks and shoot it Thursday morning.

Microsoft has apologised after a robot it made "tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images" that included support for Hitler and genocide. The company launched Tay, an artificially intelligent robot, on Twitter last week. It was intended to be a fun way of engaging people with AI – but instead was tricked by people into tweeting out support of Hitler and genocide, and repeated white power messages. Microsoft said that it had no way of knowing that people would attempt to trick the robot into tweeting the offensive words, but apologised for letting it do so. Microsoft said that it had launched Tay after success with a similar robot, XiaoIce, in China.

Google is looking to sell robotics firm Boston Dynamics after concluding that it's unlikely to produce any marketable robot in the next few years, according to people familiar with the company who spoke to Bloomberg News. Boston Dynamics has become famous for its impressive (and impressively creepy) videos featuring it torturing its robotic creations with pushes, kicks, shoves and heavy weights, to demonstrate their versatility and reliability. Those creations include the quadrupedal "Big Dog" robotic mule, its lighter and quieter sibling "Spot" and the bipedal robot "Atlas". But the firm, which was acquired by Google in 2013, has failed to live up to the aspirations placed upon it. Its machines, which were largely created in response to military contracts, haven't been easy to adapt for potential commercial sale. And while Google had promised that Boston Dynamics wouldn't take any further military projects, the company still suffered a blow when the US Marine Corps rejected the Big Dog robot, saying it was too noisy for practical use.

Anyone who's ever shaken their head over the utterances coming out of Donald Trump's mouth will surely be glad to know that they're now being improved with deep learning. DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot created by a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab that uses a deep-learning algorithm to make even Trumpier statements than Trump himself. Based on an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on transcripts of Trump's victory speeches and debate performances, the bot shows a remarkable proficiency for taking the hyperbole even further. "I'm what ISIS doesn't need" is one creation of the bot, for example. "Great manufacturing, bring back our jobs, bring back our manufacturing, because my file, you know, I don't need anybody's money. The bot creates its tweets one letter at a time, apparently following Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again."

Artificially intelligent computers understand Donald Trump not unlike artificially intelligent humans. His speeches read as extended phrases of semi-clarity interrupted by moments of utter horror. The source video is a CNN highlights reel from Donald Trump's presidential candidacy announcement in July 2015. I used audio volume (averaged over each frame) to dictate how deep to dream. For fun, I used a picture of Cthulu as a guide image.

Drone attacks killed eight men suspected of belonging to al Qaeda in southern Yemen on Saturday night, local residents said, as a U.S. campaign against the militant group goes on amid a wider civil war in the country. Two missiles hit the fighters who had gathered in courtyards in the villages of al-Hudhn and Naqeel al-Hayala, residents from the southern coastal province of Abyan told Reuters by phone. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has taken advantage of a war pitting the Iran-allied Houthis against forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to grab territory and operate more openly. The group has carried out attacks against the Yemeni state for years, plotted to blow up U.S.-bound airliners and claimed responsibility for the January 2015 attack in Paris on a French magazine that killed 12 people. The United States has kept up a drone campaign against the militants, although it evacuated the last of its military and intelligence personnel from Yemen in March last year.

The explanation was far simpler, for Microsoft engineers had made one fatal mistake: they'd programmed Tay to learn from her conversations. Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down. Technology giant Microsoft this week launched its experiment with the Tay AI (artificial intelligence) bot, which was given the personality of a teenager and was created to learn from conversing with real people. The company said she is supposed to get smarter the more users chat with her, but within 24 hours of being on Twitter she went awry, according to The Verge. A Microsoft spokesperson provided a statement to Business Insider and said, "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement".

LONDON, UK – March 17, 2016 – Massive Analytic Limited, an Artificial Intelligence pioneer, has been awarded a contract with the Ministry of Defence (MOD) through the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory's Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) to develop technologies for "autonomy and big data in defence". The contract was won as part of the largest ever competition run by CDE. It called for a proof-of-concept research proposal for innovative component technologies and techniques to acquire, process, analyse and visualise data to support decision making by both humans and autonomous systems. In its winning submission, Massive Analytic proposed a novel big data analytics platform for operational tactical planning and support, using persistent surveillance and its own patented artificial precognition, the brain behind its analytics platform, Oscar. The system will bring together multiple static and dynamic surveillance data sources, outputting predictions with high degrees of accuracy.

Zipfian Academy has graduated more than 50 alumni, placing graduates into data science roles at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber, Square, Coursera, and many more Silicon Valley companies. Participants in our program come from backgrounds in engineering, data analysis, statistics, and occasionally professional poker. Here, we share an interview with Alex Mentch, a graduate from our Winter 2014 Cohort. Alex hails originally from Idaho, and studied electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Looking for a career transition into data science, Alex attended our Winter 2014 cohort where he built a search engine for state legislation.