The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement -- not so much to professional game players as to Google's competitors. Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry's lingo, the companies are engaged in a "platform war." A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow.

As part of an experiment on conversational understanding for artificial intelligence, Microsoft recently introduced an AI chatbot called Tay. The chatbot was linked up to Twitter and people could tweet at it to get a response. It didn't take more than 24 hours to turn the chatbot into a hate-spewing racist since it picked up all sorts of wrong ideas. Microsoft has now apologized for the entire episode. The company explains in a blog post that few human users on Twitter exploited a flaw in Tay to transform it into a bigoted racist. Microsoft doesn't go into detail about what this flaw was.

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.

A neural-analogue calculator based upon a probability model of reinforcement.

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.

This week, Amazon hosted an exclusive conference that brought together big names from fields such as space exploration, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The event, which was held at the Parker Palm Springs Resort in California, was invite-only and received almost no publicity. Very little is known about the Machine-Learning Automation, Robotics, and Space Exploration (MARS) conference, which is leading some observers to question why Amazon is being so secretive about it. In fact, Amazon has yet to confirm that it even took place, and there have been no press releases or official announcements. However, several guests have shared tidbits about the event on social media.

On Wednesday March 23, Microsoft unleashed its brand new AI on Twitter. Her name was Tay, and she was programmed to tweet like a teenage girl. Microsoft didn't intend for that to happen, of course. It wanted to test and improve its algorithm for conversational language. According to Microsoft, Tay was built by "mining relevant [anonymous] public data" which was "modeled, cleaned, and filtered" to create her personality.

SAN FRANCISCO – The world's largest drone maker has teamed up with the nation's largest thermal camera company to create ready-to-fly drones that can see in the dark. The drone maker is DJI, a China-based company that currently has about 70% of the world drone market. The camera is by FLIR Systems, a Wilsonville, Ore.-based thermal and infrared imaging company. The collaboration will produce drones that can be used in search-and-rescue, firefighting, security and surveillance. At a news conference Thursday, the companies showed video shot from one of the infrared-capable drones in which several people walking in a pitch black field at night looked like brightly lit light bulbs moving across the rough ground.

When you heard about Tay, Microsoft's tweeting A.I., were you really surprised that a computer that learned about human nature from Twitter would become a raging racist in less than a day? Poor Tay started out all "hellooooooo w rld!!!" and quickly morphed into a Hitler-loving, genocide-encouraging piece of computer crap. Naturally, Microsoft apologized for the horrifying tweets by the chatbot with "zero chill." In that apology, the company stressed that the Chinese version of Tay, Xiaoice or Xiaolce, provides a very positive experience for users in stark contrast to this experiment gone so very wrong. "In China, our Xiaolce chatbot is being used by some 40 million people, delighting with its stories and conversations. The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment? Tay – a chatbot created for 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S. for entertainment purposes – is our first attempt to answer this question."