If you're worried about Facebook artificial intelligence being able to recognize every part of your life or gaining sentience, that future is a long time away. While the company's deep-learning lab has made great strides in facial recognition, its natural language systems are very much in their infancy, according to Yann Lecun, Facebook's director of AI research, who is charged with the task of making the fruits of machine learning more humanlike.

On Thursday, tech giant Google announced that it is opening a new research center in Europe, dedicated to machine learning. According to the details shared by Emmanuel Mogenet – chief of Google Research for Europe – in a recent blog post, the key focus of the new research group in Europe will be on three AI areas --- machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding. Mogenet further specified that the main objective of the research group in Europe will be to find new ways in which machine learning infrastructure can be improved, and how the technology can be put it into practical use. In addition, the new AI-focused research group will also work for the advancement of Natural Language Understanding – that is, the capability of machines to understand and process human language – in close collaboration with linguists.

But with the rollout of iOS 10, Apple will begin using differential privacy to collect and analyze user data from its keyboard, Spotlight, and Notes. Roth is a computer science professor who has quite literally written the book on differential privacy (it's titled Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy) and Federighi said Roth described Apple's work on differential privacy as "groundbreaking." Differential privacy builds on the introduction of deep linking in iOS 9 to improve Spotlight search. Although iOS 10 will only use differential privacy to improve the keyboard, deep linking, and Notes, Smith points out that Apple may use the strategy in maps, voice recognition, and other features if it proves successful.

"AI is a magnitude more complex than machine learning," states Pamela Pecs Cytron, CEO of Pendo Systems. MS Excel spreadsheets are generally referred to as "Unstructured Data," with "Structured Data" being traditional databases. This breakthrough solution liberates both structured and unstructured data and enables business users to quickly get the insights needed to make business decisions and take action. Pendo Systems is a financial technology company providing an important technology solution to a major problem in today's financial services industry: lack of transparency and disparate data.

Retailers and technology firms are experimenting with chatbots, powered by a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and live operators, to provide customer service, sales support, and other commerce-related functions. The company first integrated peer-to-peer payments into Messenger in 2015 and then launched a full chatbot API so businesses can create interactions for customers to occur within the Facebook Messenger app. While the most common uses of the device include playing music, making informational queries, and controlling home devices, Alexa (the device's default addressable name) can also tap into Amazon's full product catalog as well as your order history and intelligently carry out commands to buy stuff. Through Amazon's developer platform for the Echo (called Alexa Skills), developers can develop "skills" for Alexa that enable her to carry out new types of tasks.

Now, researchers from Google DeepMind and Stanford University have updated a theory originally developed to explain how humans and other animals learn. "The evidence seems compelling that the brain has these two kinds of learning systems, and the complementary learning systems theory explains how they complement each other to provide a powerful solution to a key learning problem that faces the brain," explained James McClelland, lead author of the 1995 paper from Stanford University. Components of the neural network architecture that succeeded in achieving human-level performance in a variety of computer games like Space Invaders and Breakout were inspired by complementary learning systems theory. According to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, "the extended version of the complementary learning systems theory is likely to continue to provide a framework for future research not only in neuroscience but also in the quest to develop Artificial General Intelligence -- our goal at Google DeepMind."

In my opinion, the marriage of the leading professional social network and the world's largest software company demonstrates that we are decidedly at the start of a new era in software, where proprietary data is king, and will start to come bundled together with software. We've seen this rise in the consumer realm, where technology companies are fundamentally aggregating and analyzing user behavior, and providing value back to users (and, of course, advertisers.) There are countless other examples that also demonstrate that consumer technology puts behavioral and user data front and center, in a way that I expect we will start to see from the enterprise as the divide between these two segments starts to collapse. Taken together, this demonstrates that proven machine learning algorithms have both the horsepower and access to granular datasets that are unprecedented.

In a blog post, Amy Nicholson, technical evangelist at Microsoft, explains how she used the Cortana Intelligence Gallery, together with Azure ML Studio, to help her start building her own ML (machine learning) models "as well as my knowledge about this space." Azure ML is a fully managed cloud service on Microsoft Azure that helps you easily build, deploy and share predictive analytics solutions, Nicholson writes. All of this in a simple drag-and-drop interface to go from an idea to the deployment of a ML API in a matter of clicks." To learn more, visit the Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog.

Zuckerberg was taking questions live from Facebook users Tuesday as part of a demo of his company's live video feature, which lets anyone launch live global broadcasts using their web cameras. Seinfeld, being Seinfeld, appeared less interested in talking about connecting the world and new products and more interested in probingZuckerberg's personal life. The break is small and Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, isn't wearing a cast. The comedian noted that Facebook staff had repeatedly warned him about the CEO's broken arm as he wandered around Facebook's Menlo Park, California, campus on Tuesday.

On Monday, Apple exec Craig Federighi quickly mentioned how Apple is going to try and catch up to Google's smart Photo app: "on-device intelligence." Similarly, Microsoft offers developers a cloud service that will automatically caption photos. "It's disappointing to see that Apple is not offering developers and customers the option to tap into the power of applying machine learning to data hosted in cloud services. Apple has increased the privacy and encryption capabilities in their operating systems, but at the expense of not taking advantage of powerful machine learning capabilities," he adds.