LifeBeam is launching a Kickstarter campaign for a personal trainer that is driven by artificial intelligence. Dubbed Vi, the assistant features AI embedded in your earphones and tells you what to do during your workout. If you are running behind your usual pace on a familiar run, for example, Vi will ask you politely if you want to speed it up. Or if your heart rate is getting too high, Vi will sense that and advise you to slow down. Vi may remind you of Scarlett Johanson's AI voice in the film Her.

The newspaper business is shrinking fast. Print ad revenues keep falling, and cost-cutting is the mantra of the day. So why is Tribune Publishing fighting so hard to avoid the embrace of USA Today owner Gannett? It may come down to a clash of bean-counters against visionaries--assuming, of course, it's not just about holding out for the best price. Gannett wants Tribune--the company behind the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major daily papers--because bigger is better in a shrinking industry.

"Warcraft," a fantasy epic based on the popular video game series, is opening in China next weekend, and it may already spell "game over" for any movie that dares to compete with it. The little-hyped movie, produced by Legendary Entertainment and distributed by Universal Pictures, may not even clear 100 million in the U.S. And yet, based on the reliable proxy of internet presales, it is on pace to top "Furious 7" as the highest-grossing Hollywood film ever in China. Either way, it will be a nice win for Legendary's parent company -- the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group -- in its burgeoning rivalry with the Walt Disney Company, whose movies have dominated Middle Kingdom multiplexes for months. Chinese film fans love Disney's animated fare and its Marvel superhero movies, but based on presale numbers for "Warcraft," they might love video games more. Despite being released in just 20 countries so far -- mostly in Europe -- "Warcraft has already reeled in about 31.6 million, according to comScore.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. "Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools," the Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, "nurse avatars" that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There's even a "guru avatar" in development, designed to teach meditation. These products are exciting and futuristic--just a decade ago, the possibility of conversing with a computer program seemed like science fiction.

Unlike robotic AIs that are being built to emulate the human brain, UNU works with existing human intelligence instead of replicating it. The platform, which is open to public, allows a group of people to come together and converge on an answer in real time. While a swarm of seven predicted the Oscars, the Derby decision came from 20 people. For the AMA at 1pm ET today, the group that will make political predictions is expected to range from 100 to 200 people. The participants will come from UNU's current user base that has already answered fantasy football and cooking queries.

A computer's artificial intelligence system has been taught to understand Blade Runner well enough for a Goldsmiths, University of London student to remake the entire film based on the AI system's interpretation. Terence Broad has gone on to remake other films based on the AI's understanding of Blade Runner. Over the last couple of years, scientists working in the machine-learning world have developed artificial neural networks (inspired by animals' brains) that can learn to generate new images based on information they learn from real images. The generated images have become so natural that computers and the human eye can't tell real and artificial apart. But most models create images that are variations of a similar thing – such as a face or picture of a bedroom – taken from the same angle.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. - The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning to household gadgets is "gigantic," according to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a huge hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens." The Echo speaker can turn on lights, access online music and answer queries by awaking the speaker and waking it by stating the word Alexa.

Apple is set to hold its biggest software event of the year, WWDC, in the middle of June. It'll use the San Francisco event to show off all of the software that's on its way to your Watch, phone and other computers – as well as potentially new Apple devices. The event comes at a big time for Apple. The company is fresh off the back of its first quarter of decline since the iPhone came out, and is feeling the heat from other companies like Google. It will intend to use WWDC as a way of showcasing the software and potentially other products that it hopes will prove its doubters wrong and get the company to grow again.

A few weeks ago, an anonymous website arrived with a countdown clock, one set to hit zero on May 31. The domain, Prophets of Rage, is named for a Public Enemy song, and arrived with a red-and-black militaristic logo. Prophets of Rage also started posting oblique Instagram photos and embeds of Public Enemy and Cypress Hill tracks. It did all this while referencing a hashtag: #takethepowerback. This wasn't a political movement or an armed insurrection.

Stock photo giant Shutterstock is boosting its artificial intelligence (AI) credentials today with the launch of a new reverse image search feature within its iOS app. The New York-based company offers more than 80 million images for bloggers and media outlets, but keyword searches aren't always the most effective way to find images relevant to a story. If you want to search for photos that are similar to ones you already have in your possession, or if you want to find alternative photos based on the shapes, mood, color scheme, and general mise en scène around you, reverse image search comes into play. You can search Shutterstock by using the camera on your iPhone or the photos on your camera roll to find similar images. The launch comes three months after Shutterstock first introduced the feature through its desktop version, though extending it to smartphones does feel like a natural move, given that smartphones are cameras in their own right. "When we unveiled Reverse Image Search this past spring, we knew that it was a perfect fit for our mobile application -- it's arguably one of the best use cases for computer vision technology, in general," said Shutterstock CEO and founder Jon Oringer.