Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI just received a package that took 2 billion to develop: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang just delivered the first DGX-1 supercomputer to the non-profit organization, which is dedicated to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." The "AI supercomputer in a box" is packed with 170 teraflops of computing power--that's equivalent to 250 conventional servers. NVIDIA says it's a very fitting match: "The world's leading non-profit artificial intelligence research team needs the world's fastest AI system." "I thought it was incredibly appropriate that the world's first supercomputer dedicated to artificial intelligence would go to the laboratory that was dedicated to open artificial intelligence," Huang added. The supercomputer will tackle the most difficult challenges facing the artificial intelligence industy…by reading through Reddit forums.

Between Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, AMC currently has a cable ratings juggernaut on its hands. But before the network put all its eggs in the zombie basket, it was committed to developing critical darling successors to shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The would-be fill-in for the latter, Low Winter Sun, got cancelled after a single botched season. But Halt and Catch Fire, a darkly lit drama following Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), a tortured genius businessman in the fledgling world of personal computers in 1980s Texas, rebounded from anemic early ratings to earn increasingly improbable renewals for a second and then third season. And that's when the show did something pretty remarkable: It got even better.

FILE - In this Tuesday, July 26, 2016, file photo, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., left, discusses the company's new Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev. On Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2016, Tesla reports financial results. SAN FRANCISCO - Elon Musk is gleefully pushing the technological envelope in the arenas of rocketry, transportation and solar energy. But when it comes to much-hyped and coming promise of artificially intelligent machines, the man at the helm of Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity has deep concerns. In a video clip released Wednesday to Fortune magazine from German documentarian Werner Herzog's upcoming film about the Internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (premiering Aug. 19), Musk is subdued as he explains how AI could pose a significant threat even if such technology isn't in the hands of dictators and criminals.

David Cronenberg's 1999 feature film EXISTENZ with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law unfolds in multiple layers of reality. It takes place in a future where games are made from biological materials powered by peoples' bodies. The game consoles have fleshy appendages and buttons, which require stroking. They attach to the body via an umbilical cord. Dr. Duncan Buell is a computer scientist at the University of South Carolina who has loved science fiction since he was a child.

It may not spring to mind as the first place you would turn to develop the art of conversation, but an AI firm backed by Elon Musk is hoping Reddit will help it's machine learn to converse. The OpenAI project is using a supercomputer known as a DGX-1 for its experiment, feeding popular Reddit threads to the AI for analysis, in the hope it will one day hold a conversation itself. However, the project follows a similar idea from Microsoft - which has to pull its learning chatbot after it began posting racist and offensive messages after just hours. OpenAI will feed popular Reddit threads to algorithms that have a probabilistic understanding of dialogue with the hopes it will one day hold a conversation itself. By feeding Reddit threads to DGX-1, it will hopefully read and learn a range of conversations faster than any other system has done before it, as conversations are filled with natural human language and commonly used slang.

This June, we published a big story--Shane Bauer's account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That's "big," as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary. It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we're told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR's Weekend Edition picked it up.

From Siri to Alexa, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common, but for all their recent advances, they often struggle with one of the most basic characteristics of human speech: accents. The problem is so prevalent that computer scientists have identified the existence of a "machine voice," a standardized way of speaking that individuals with accents adopt in the hope of being understood. Researchers even warn about the existence of a "speech divide" that ostracizes individuals whose accents differ from those the machines have been trained on. As is often the case with technology built on large data sets, the problem begins with the input. If you only train your interface using a narrow selection of voices, then it won't know how to respond to accents that fall outside of its frame of reference.

We asked the representatives of Strategic Technologies Department "Microsoft Russia" to tell us how a new device Pix works and what services were used creating it. Professional photographers are familiar with the feeling when you take million shots expecting a perfect one, when it is essential to capture the moment because in a split second the shot will change forever. We all remember the feeling when we want to feel ourselves a pro and get a unique perfect shot using a smartphone, which is always with us, but unfortunately lacks some functions of a professional camera. Microsoft scientific-research team offered a solution of this problem and developed Microsoft Pix, an app for iPhone aimed at adjusting the settings for taking the best shots (ISO, exposition, focus) using the technologies of artificial intelligence. In this article we are going to consider it from a user's and developer's perspectives.

The discovery by Tufts University biologists presents the first model of regeneration discovered by a non-human intelligence and the first comprehensive model of planarian regeneration, which had eluded human scientists for over 100 years. The work, published in the June 4, 2015, issue of PLOS Computational Biology, demonstrates how "robot science" can help human scientists in the future. In order to bioengineer complex organs, scientists need to understand the mechanisms by which those shapes are normally produced by the living organism. However, a significant knowledge gap persists between molecular genetic components identified as being necessary to produce a particular organism shape and understanding how and why that particular complex shape is generated in the correct size, shape and orientation, said the paper's senior author, Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush professor of biology and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. "Most regenerative models today derived from genetic experiments are arrow diagrams, showing which gene regulates which other gene. That's fine, but it doesn't tell you what the ultimate shape will be. You cannot tell if the outcome of many genetic pathway models will look like a tree, an octopus or a human," said Levin.

Zoltan Istvan, who represents the Transhumanist Party and bills himself as "the science candidate" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has garnered more media coverage than many third party candidates, with recent mentions in Vocativ, The Verge, USA Today, and Pacific Standard. He also writes regularly for Motherboard and The Huffington Post. Istvan's popularity is likely due to a combination of his quirky campaign style (he drives around in a bus painted to resemble a coffin with "Science vs. The Coffin" written above the bumper) and an unconventional platform that pushes for gene editing, human life extension, and morphological freedom (the right to do anything to your body so long as it doesn't harm others). As a broader movement, transhumanism focuses on leveraging science and technology toward the ultimate goal of overcoming death, largely through as-yet-unproven methods such as mind uploading, in which a person's entire consciousness would be transferred to a digital system or machine.