Rohan Silva and Timandra Harkness discover how close we are to The Singularity - the day when machines match human intelligence. And they find out why it's so vital to understand the implications of such a momentous future event right now.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware, and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales.

Three years later in 2016, enough time has passed to discern patterns from trends. In that time the industry has experienced seismic shifts and a sweeping wave of consolidation. So let's take another look at the state of the digital nation and why, for the bold, great opportunity lies ahead. There's plenty of additional reading in the links for those who want to go down the rabbit hole, as well as a reference table at the end. Happy to continue the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #DigitalNation at @ezyjules and @marvelapp. A sweeping wave of acquisitions has decimated the ranks of independent agencies and formed two clashing clans. On the one side are the giants of advertising and marketing and on the other the titans of management consultancy. Meanwhile the market over which they are fighting is in the midst of a multi-faceted existential crisis. Over the last four years the design consultancy industry has experienced an unprecedented period of consolidation, building to a ...

This paper proposes CF-NADE, a neural autoregressive architecture for collaborative filtering (CF) tasks, which is inspired by the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based CF model and the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE). We first describe the basic CF-NADE model for CF tasks. Then we propose to improve the model by sharing parameters between different ratings. A factored version of CF-NADE is also proposed for better scalability. Furthermore, we take the ordinal nature of the preferences into consideration and propose an ordinal cost to optimize CF-NADE, which shows superior performance. Finally, CF-NADE can be extended to a deep model, with only moderately increased computational complexity. Experimental results show that CF-NADE with a single hidden layer beats all previous state-of-the-art methods on MovieLens 1M, MovieLens 10M, and Netflix datasets, and adding more hidden layers can further improve the performance.

Google's new project, Magenta is due to be released on June 1 and is set to take the world of art by storm. The project is part of the Google Brain group, which is a deep learning project that has been operating since 2011 and is focused on solving the problems scientist face with artificial intelligence. The Magenta project has been created to explore the exciting possibilities of artificial intelligence being able to create beautiful works of art, music, video and a host of many other visual arts. Douglas Eck, who is one of the teams researchers has explained that their main goal is to produce a range of open-source tool and models that are available to everyone bring many creative capabilities together on one platform. The produce of an artificial neural network being asked to amplify and pull patterns out of white noise.

The humanoid robot will take and process customer orders in Pizza Hut restaurants by the end of 2016. About CNBC: From'Wall Street' to'Main Street' to award winning original documentaries and Reality TV series, CNBC has you covered. Experience special sneak peeks of your favorite shows, exclusive video and more. Connect with CNBC News Online Get the latest news: http://www.cnbc.com/ Find CNBC News on Facebook: http://cnb.cx/LikeCNBC

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the future. It is becoming the present faster than you can say MTV. Right now, a chatbot is learning how to hold a conversation by analyzing millions of Facebook posts, ranging from your favorite movie quotes to your local pizza menus, thus allowing it to figure out dinner, muse on the meaning of life, the color of love, philosophy, style, and even regional gratuity percentage. Communication between humans and artificial intelligence is the key, deciding factor in the evolution of this relationship. If it doesn't work, it will backup the system and force our ingrained distrust to blossom. An example of what's to come…

As with most recent developments in AI, the web erupted with outlandish storylines. Many described the move as bold despite the fact that (Torch), which is maintained by Ronan Collobert of Facebook AI Research, already offers categorically similar open-source deep learning tools and that Yoshua Bengio's lab has long maintained Theano, the revolutionary software package which pioneered the category in the first place, making deep learning easy for the masses. In an article at Wired, Cade Metz described TensorFlow as Google's "Artificial Intelligence Engine". Even this headline stands out as hyperbolic for an article describing an open-source library for performing linear algebra and taking derivatives. A number of other news outlets marveled that Google made the code open source.

Journeyman director Stephen Hopkins doesn't try to pep up the bland biopic formula with his Jesse Owens drama "Race," but he does deliver a reasonably stirring version of a story that bears retelling. Stephan James gives an engaging performance as Owens, who overcomes prejudice and intense national pressure to compete and win at the 1936 Olympic Games. The movie leans heavily on a simplistic heroes-and-villains narrative, but that's hard to fault too much when the main bad guy is, y'know, Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, "Race" is broad but effective, reminding viewers of an important moment in the history of American sports and patriotism -- which was also one more step down the long, seemingly unending road toward eliminating bigotry. Cult animator Bill Plympton has made one of his oddest and most entertaining feature films with the mockumentary "Hitler's Folly," which uses some of the Nazi leader's real artwork and early biographical details to imagine an alternate history where Hitler aimed to be a rival to Walt Disney as well as a genocidal dictator. While Hitler steers the Reich's resources into making one unwieldy epic, Disney responds by putting all of his studio's visionary technicians to work on the American war effort, employing animatronic robots to fool the enemy.

"Dials and buttons, knobs and switches; they're very charming," says James Ball, the digital art director behind a new photography series called Guide to Computing, which celebrates early computers. Ball, who works under the pseudonym Docubyte, began the project after developing a fascination and affection for such retro devices. "It's rare now to find any machine that you can touch and interact with," he says. "Computers now are all touch screens, slick and super-slim." Ball feels that computers that pre-date the Apple era aren't widely considered to be design pieces, and his nostalgia for this earlier, more "naive" aesthetic led him to seek out and photograph a range of machines that date from the latter half of the 20th century, representing them as if they were new and desirable products.