Google announced its next generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) machine learning chips at Google I/O today. These chips, which are designed specifically to speed up machine learning tasks, are supposed to be more capable than CPUs or even GPUs at these tasks and are an upgrade from the first generation of chips the company released at last year's I/O. And speed up they have. Google claims the each second-generation TPU can deliver up to 180 teraflops of performance. We will have to wait and see what the average benchmarks look like, but they are a step forward for more than speed.

Without noticing it, artificial intelligence (AI) already fits in many forms into our daily lives and supports our decision-making. At times, it's discussed a bit like blockchain, which we're being promised will solve things like world hunger and human trafficking. However, artificial intelligence is already prevalent practically everywhere in technology, from cars to Google searches and as this technology is specifically designed for singular tasks, we humans cannot compete with that level of insistent focus. This relates specifically to what is called Artificial Narrow Intelligence or ANI designed to perform one sole task meticulously. The two next levels of AI development, specifically Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) are still out of our reach, for now.

Although some thinkers use the term "singularity" to refer to any dramatic paradigm shift in the way we think and perceive our reality, in most conversations The Singularity refers to the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence. What that point looks like, though, is subject to debate, as is the date when it will happen. In a recent interview with Inverse, Stanford University business and energy and earth sciences graduate student Damien Scott provided his definition of singularity: the moment when humans can no longer predict the motives of AI. Many people envision singularity as some apocalyptic moment of truth with a clear point of epiphany. Scott doesn't see it that way. "We'll start to see narrow artificial intelligence domains that keep getting better than the best human," Scott told Inverse.

They can be used to perform a variety of different functions within the realms of customer service, customer interaction and many different "top of the funnel" advertising and marketing initiatives. While chatbots have been around for a while, they recently blew up in popularity when Facebook allowed branded chatbots onto its Facebook Messenger app. Instead of having to call and sit on a phone waiting to ask a five-second question, you can simply message a customer service chatbot and get your answer in a flash. Chatbots can play a large role analyzing customer data, and optimizing sales and marketing strategies in light of this analysis.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, OpenAI's newest robot system should leave humanity blushing. Not only can it successfully replicate human behaviors, it can do so after just a single demonstration of the task. The research company co-founded and chaired by Elon Musk used two separate neural networks to develop its one-shot imitation learning system. The first, a vision network, analyzes an image from the robot's camera to determine the location of objects in reality (in OpenAI's video example, these objects are blocks of wood on a table). The network is able to do this despite never having seen the actual table or blocks before.

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) and its partners have unveiled an automated chat service using artificial intelligence (AI) to offer guidance to customers in Japan. SMFG is working with SMBC Nikko Securities, NTT Communications, with support from Accenture Japan, and their service will become available on 25 May 2017 at SMBC's contact centre to improve its LINE-based inquiry service. LINE is a freeware app for instant communications on electronic devices. Once launched this month, the AI chatbot will provide guidance on ways to open accounts as well as on initial public offerings (IPO) and NISA (a type of Japanese individual savings account). They also plan to expand the service to include such things as share price inquiries and investment trust selection.

Is it possible that someday we will elect an AI president? Given some of the recent occupants of the White House, many might consider it an upgrade. After all, humans are prone to making decisions based on ego, anger, and the need for self-aggrandizement, not the common good. An artificially intelligent president could be trained to maximize happiness for the most people without infringing on civil liberties. It might even learn that it's a good idea to tweet less--or not at all.

The international director of campaign group CAGE has been charged under anti-terror laws, after refusing to surrender his passwords to police. Muhammad Rabbani was arrested last November after handing his laptop and mobile phone to officers but refusing to unlock them, after being stopped and searched at Heathrow Airport. He has now been charged under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Google Lens looks fresh and exciting--but we've see hints of this technology before. Google Goggles might not have been mentioned during the I/O keynote, but its spirit was most certainly present at I/O on Wednesday. Released seven years ago when AI and AR were still in their infancy, Goggles was an app that let you identify places, scan barcodes, and search for prices by snapping a photo of the thing you were looking at. Google Lens, which was announced during the very first minutes of I/O, is essentially a supercharged version of Google Goggles. Built into Assistant and Photos, the new machine learning AI promises to decode the world around us by using Google's AR and neural networks to scan images and pull out relevant bits of data.

The future of Android will be a lot smarter, thanks to new programming tools that Google unveiled on Wednesday. The company announced TensorFlow Lite, a version of its machine learning framework that's designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices, during the keynote address at its Google I/O developer conference. "TensorFlow Lite will leverage a new neural network API to tap into silicon-specific accelerators, and over time we expect to see [digital signal processing chips] specifically designed for neural network inference and training," said Dave Burke, Google's vice president of engineering for Android. "We think these new capabilities will help power a next generation of on-device speech processing, visual search, augmented reality, and more." The Lite framework will be made a part of the open source TensorFlow project soon, and the neural network API will come to the next major release of Android later this year.