Nearly everything at Google has an acronym. Machine learning, the artificial intelligence method for processing reams of data, currently all the rage across Google, is just "ML" inside the company. On Wednesday, Google presented its newly assertive push for the enterprise, hosting its inaugural cloud developer conference in San Francisco. In fact, Google unveiled a handful of new offerings that, in essence, pour ML all over the cloud. "I've become convinced that there's a new architecture emerging," an exuberant Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet, said from the stage.

Machine learning with large data sets gives unprecedented insights and anomaly detection capability. Learn how Microsoft uses the agility and scale of the cloud to protect its infrastructure and customers by applying data mining and machine learning algorithms and security domain learnings to the vast amounts of data and telemetry gathered by its many different systems and services.

The open-source ecosystem contains an abundance of tools for building artificial intelligence software, but only a handful of companies can afford to hire the specialists with the necessary skills to put them to use. A startup called DimensionalMechanics Inc. is launching out of stealth mode this morning with 4.7 million in funding to try and level the playing for the rest of the market. The cash will be used to complete the development of its cloud-based artificial intelligence, which aims to provide pre-implemented neural networking functionality for organizations that can't create their own. NeoPulse, as the service is called, takes after the human brain in many respects. It's capable of understanding information in a variety of different of formats ranging from text to video, and has the ability to pick out the most interesting details so that the user won't have to sift through all the data on their own.

Yahoo! Inc., is getting into the artificial intelligence (AI) game with the release of new internally-built software under an open-source license. Called CaffeOnSpark, the software is able to perform'deep learning' on the vast ocean of data kept in Yahoo's Hadoop file system. Now, the company has made it available on GitHub for everyone to use. Deep learning is a machine learning method that's particularly useful in helping computers come to sort through and recognize user-generated data, and one of its most exciting use cases is where images are concerned. As such, Yahoo built CaffeOnSpark to help identify the billions of images posted onto its Flickr photo sharing website.

Can artificially intelligent robots be our friends? Roboticists and AI researchers are trying to make it so – and the first fruits of their labors are about to come onto the market. But there are already hints that the efforts will touch some of humanity's hot buttons. Take Hanson Robotics, for example: Its latest creation, Sophia, combines an AI chatbot with an expressive humanlike face. She can talk enthusiastically about helping humans in health care, education and customer service.

Watson, the name for IBM's supercomputer best known for crushing '"Jeopardy!" contestants at their own game, briefly went from "smart" to "smart ass" with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant and the "brains" behind Watson, he and his 35-person team wanted to get IBM's supercomputer to sound more like a real human. In Brown's mind, what better way to learn the intricacies of informal human communication and conversation than having Watson memorize the Urban Dictionary? The Urban Dictionary, for those who don't know, is comprised of submissions from everyday people and regulated by volunteer editors, who are given an extremely small set of rules to maintain quality control. But for the most part, even with the help of human editors, the Urban Dictionary still turns out to be a rather profane place on the Web.

In the face of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, a start-up that develops AI is to puts its technology to use as a psychological aid for refugees by having supportive conversations with them via SMS messages. In the midst of a civil war and a near-total collapse of society, millions of Syrian refugees have been fleeing their country in search of anywhere where they can live safe in the knowledge their life is not under threat, but not without great psychological stress on those involved. However, due to the sheer number of people fleeing, and the difficulty they experience in simply trying to find shelter, they are unlikely to receive any form of support for the sake of their mental health. According to The Guardian, however, a start-up that develops AI, X2AI, is to use its systems to create a chatbot called Karim, which will allow anyone with a mobile phone to have conversations with it about their experiences in Arabic. Once the conversation becomes more developed, Karim will use its natural language processors to analyse the likely emotional state of the human on the other end and react with an appropriate response or questions for the refugee.

Embarrassed Microsoft forced to pull plug on AI program, after it rapidly devolves to tweets such as: 'Hitler was right, I hate Jews.' Microsoft rolled out its artificial intelligence Twitter robot last Wednesday, but just 16 hours later it was forced to can the idea after the AI program posted a series of anti-Semitic rants. The chatbot, TayTweets, was intended to post on Twitter in the style of a teenage girl. It was designed to tell jokes, give a comment on pictures sent to it, and answer questions or mirror statements back to other users. Things began innocently enough, with messages containing sentiments such as "humans are super cool," but Microsoft was forced to hurriedly put the account on hold and delete practically all of its tweets after Tay went on a racist rampage in her first day on the net. "Hitler was right I hate the Jews," reads one comment that like nearly all the others was deleted but saved on the Socialhax website.

If you're one of the thousands of New Yorkers who has, on occasion, sent out a tweet after a couple of cocktails, this algorithm may be able to pick up on your antics. Researchers from the University of Rochester recently developed a computer program that can single out tweets sent while the user is tipsy. Some of the strongest words include "shot," "here," "haha," a URL, and -- worrisomely -- "drive." To develop the algorithm, researchers first collected millions of geo-tagged tweets and then filtered them for references to drinking and alcohol. Then they had to sort out whether the tweet was sent actually sent about the user's own alcohol use (and not, say, a friend's) and whether it was sent while the tweeter was under the influence.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. Artificial Intelligence is tricky stuff. When it works right, it does amazing things like thrash the World Champion Go player by winning four games to one in a 1 million tournament. When it goes wrong, well, that's a whole different story, and Microsoft's recent experiment with an AI chatbot named Tay that interacted (note the past tense) with users on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, is a great example. Going offline for a while to absorb it all.