Maybe the one single thing more regrettable than drunk texting is drunk tweeting. Publicly broadcasting intoxication is definitely not the best way to bolster one's social media clout, and yet a lot of people can't resist boasting about their alcoholic escapades. Researchers have now trained an algorithm to spot alcohol-related tweets, and even to guess if the tweeter was drinking at the time of posting. Nabil Hossain at the University of Rochester, upstate New York, decided to combine Twitter and machine learning to keep track of alcohol use across a given community. To do that, he and his team collected thousands of geotagged posts tweeted between July 2013 and July 2014 in New York state, and then winnowed them down to tweets containing booze-related keywords (ranging from "beer keg" to "shitfaced").

In 2012, IBM Watson went to medical school. So said The New York Times, announcing that the tech giant's artificially intelligent question-and-answer machine had begun a "stint as a medical student" at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. This was just a metaphor. Clinicians were helping IBM train Watson for use in medical research. But as metaphors go, it wasn't a very good one.

Patients realize that their electronic devices help them with their day-to-day lives, including their health care consumer products, such as fitness bands. As a consumer, I am concerned with the "pain points" of health care, including my interactions with health care professionals, convenience, utility, and price. A health coach that is neither disruptive nor burdensome to my world, and highly personalized to me, is the ultimate expression of a consumer experience. An AI avatar can provide this. We are at the dawn of yet another AI era, equivalent to the integration of multiple devices into a single smartphone.

The predictions that robots and artificial intelligence will soon take over the world may be a little premature. To be sure, the field of artificial intelligence is booming, and the technology is rapidly evolving. As its name implies, AI uses computer learning to handle all manner of basic human tasks, such as decision-making and data analysis. Its potential applications include everything from manufacturing to, yes, even being a CEO, by some estimates. And if you're a startup in artificial intelligence, the time to get funding is now, according to new research from CB Insights, the venture capital research firm. AI companies received 310 million in 54 funding deals in 2015, a seven-fold increase in the last four years.

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?

Courtesy of Oscar SalazarOscar Salazar was a co-founder of Uber. Imagine a world where any child with a smartphone has access to a personal tutor who's familiar with his or her learning style. Where bots recognize the symptoms of a sickness you describe, so a healthcare provider can quickly and efficiently help you get better. And where transportation companies know where and when you need to get somewhere before you even tell them. That's the world Oscar Salazar, a co-founder of Uber and now an independent entrepreneur, is excited about.

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google's AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer--yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Late last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that AI could take over the world, sparking a flurry of commentary both in condemnation and support. For such a monumental future event, there's a startling amount of disagreement about whether or not it'll even happen, or what form it will take.

Social networking giant Facebook is using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology and resources to map the entire Earth and launch the world's most detailed population maps that will help it beam cheap internet to remote areas. To begin with, the Facebook AI team crunched 14.6 billion images of maps from across 20 countries, including India, covering 21.6 million sq kms to come up with the first detailed map of human settlement for these countries. "This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn't always exist," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a latest post. The 20 countries mapped were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Each are British artificial intelligence and machine learning startups bought by US tech giants--HP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, respectively. Alongside growing VC funding in AI, US tech firms are snapping up British-founded startups, leading to concerns that the UK is losing the best of its artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley just as it becomes a key technology. Simon Walker, partner in corporate technology at law firm Taylor Wessing, said the sale of AI startups to US firms isn't new and doesn't look like it'll stop soon. "It is obviously disappointing that the AI cannot be retained in the UK," he said. "However, top-of-the-market AI, such as that developed by companies such as SwiftKey and DeepMind, requires huge investment and a significant platform for its use and it is only very large tech companies which have the necessary resources and platforms."

Artificial Intelligence is the buzzword these days. It has become the most popular component of many innovative software startups that are seeking to redefine their markets. But whenever we hear this word, a plethora of voices can be heard in the background raising concerns about long-term consequences of AI uses. Among these skeptics is one Elon Musk, Co-founder, Tesla Motors, who sees AI "more dangerous than nukes". Stephen Hawking has also echoed similar fears, predicting that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Though these concerns carry weight and need to be addressed responsibly, the changes and the advancement that the world is witnessing due to AI and machine learning techniques suggest that technology is in safe hands.