NEW YORK – A half-gallon of milk was 50 cents cheaper at a Whole Foods in New York. Ground beef was down by $2 a pound. Amazon kicked off its first day as the owner of Whole Foods by slashing prices, adding its logo on signs and setting up a stand of "farm fresh" Amazon Echo voice-assistant devices by store entrances. It's just the first taste of the moves the e-commerce giant will make at the organic grocer after it completed the $13.7 billion deal on Monday. More changes are coming: The company aims to make Amazon Prime the rewards program at Whole Foods and some Whole Foods products will show up on Amazon's site.

A new feature allows users to ask Amazon's voice assistant Alexa to play "baby making jazz music." FILE - This file photo provided by Amazon shows models of the Amazon Echo Show. With Echo Show, Amazon has given its voice-enabled Echo speaker a touch screen and video-calling capabilities as it competes with Google's efforts at bringing "smarts" to the home. Amazon has been ramping up efforts to get more people to shop using the Alexa voice assistant on Echo speakers and other Amazon devices. NEW YORK -- In the name of convenience, Amazon and Walmart are pushing people to shop by just talking to a digital assistant.

In another sign of changes to come, a display offering Amazon's Echo and smaller Echo Dot hands-free smart speakers for $99.99 and $44.99, respectively, was nestled amid the colorful produce at the Whole Foods in downtown Los Angeles. Those gadgets sell for the same price on Amazon.com.

Price cuts on staples at Whole Foods (WFM) are aimed at boosting traffic at rivals' expense This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (August 28, 2017). Inc. (AMZN) will bring lower prices to its new Whole Foods Market Inc. It also will bring a new rule book. While Amazon doesn't need to make money from its grocery division yet, food sales are crucial for traditional players like Kroger (KR), Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Target Corp. (TGT) The extremely competitive food-retail business demands high capital investments for low margins. Supermarkets' success has mainly relied on getting customers into conveniently located stores with deals.

Amazon isn't wasting any time now that its Whole Foods acquisition has gone through. Sure enough, visitors to Whole Foods stores have noticed that the grocery stores are already pitching discounted Echo speakers ($100 for the regular model, and $45 for the Dot) at very prominent stands. They're "farm fresh," according to the displays -- as if you'd find them growing in a field next to the carrots. It's a pretty shameless plug, although one you could have seen coming. Amazon craves retail space, and Whole Foods' abundance of stores (470 across North America and the UK) gives it plenty of opportunities to hawk its hardware.

Regardless of whether the learner is a human or machine, the basic learning process is similar. Machine learning algorithms are divided into categories according to their purpose. There are lots of overlaps in which ML algorithms are applied to a particular problem. As a result, for the same problem, there could be many different ML models possible. So, coming out with the best ML model is an art that requires a lot of patience and trial and error.

Criminals have it rough these days. Modern technology has made it impossible to get away with anything, from shoplift-deterrent sensors to ever-cheaper security cameras to social media footprints chipping away at anonymity. Now even the global $900 billion shadow economy behind counterfeiting luxury goods is in danger: AI startup Entrupy is the first company to try curbing the trafficking of counterfeits (and restore trust to resale markets in the process) using artificial intelligence. Vidyuth Srinivasan, CEO and cofounder of Entrupy, spoke with me about this fascinating industry, how a cross-country motorbike ride proves the importance of stopping counterfeits, and the biggest challenge they've overcome so far. When I started Entrupy alongside my cofounders Ashlesh Sharma and Lakshmi Subramanian, we set ourselves a goal of building a scalable and versatile technology solution to combat the second oldest problem of humanity, counterfeit goods.

Amazon could be getting its own in-house fashion designer that uses algorithms to work out what looks good. Researchers at the retail giant are working on machine-learning systems that could potentially shape fashion trends of the future, according to a new report. Amazon and other retail companies are trying to track trends better and make recommendations based on products popping up on people's Facebook and Instagram posts. Amazon and other companies are trying to track trends better and make recommendations based on products popping up on people's Facebook and Instagram posts (stock image) Researchers at the retail giant are working on machine-learning systems that could potentially shape fashion trends of the future. The system relies on a tool called GAN (generative adversarial network).

What is the hottest topic in retail blogs for 2017? There is a fairly good reason for this, it's connected to the future of how consumers search, press buttons in apps to get stuff in the real world done and how we connect with services, goods, connected devices, fun experiences, and most of all with each other. Advances in computer vision and real-time NLP means AI is more actionable, and we are seeing this on the front lines of retail innovation. In 2017, even local merchants can upgrade their stores with exceptionally good foot traffic sensors, loyalty marketing retargeting that's basically automated and do ad-tech promos right at the POS basically for free. Perhaps as Tom Goodwin states, the future of retail pertains to everything being shoppable.

Since this version of the book is for the Indian market, I was a bit worried about the potential differences from the U.S. 3rd edition. But after doing a first-hand comparison, I found a LOT more similarities than differences. The biggest difference is the absence of the last two chapters. The U.S. edition includes: Chapter 26, "Philosophical Foundations", which covers arguments over consciousness in machines and the possibility of robot uprisings; and Chapter 27, "AI: The Present and Future", which *briefly* describes some things AI researchers need to work on before we can build a "general-purpose intelligent agent" (a.k.a. These two chapters are interesting, but I wouldn't call them core material, so I'm not surprised they got left out.