Apple recently purchased Turi, a Seattle-based machine learning company. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The tech giant's standard response to questions about recent acquisitions is frustratingly static and uninformative. But the company's latest purchase, machine learning startup Turi, is at least its fourth acquisition in the artificial intelligence space over the last several months – suggesting that whatever its "purpose or plans," Apple is certainly looking to make its devices smarter. The tech giant purchased the Seattle-based startup for around 200 million, according to GeekWire.

Networking among virtual machines in Microsoft Azure is going to get a whole lot faster thanks to some new hardware that Microsoft has rolled out across its fleet of data centers. The company announced Monday that it has deployed hundreds of thousands of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) across servers in 15 countries and five different continents. The chips have been put to use in a variety of first-party Microsoft services, and they're now starting to accelerate networking on the company's Azure cloud platform. In addition to improving networking speeds, the FPGAs (which sit on custom, Microsoft-designed boards connected to Azure servers) can also be used to improve the speed of machine-learning tasks and other key cloud functionality. Microsoft hasn't said exactly what the contents of the boards include, other than revealing that they hold an FPGA, static RAM chips and hardened digital signal processors.

Learning to code isn't as easy as snapping a photo, but Alex Klein is betting that the two are more closely connected than you might think. Klein is the co-founder of Kano (the British company that developed the cleverly designed DIY computer kit that teaches kids to code), and on a recent fall day he's sitting in front of me with a transparent camera in his hand, showing me how to build my own photo filter. On his laptop, Klein drags and drops a block of code using the Kano operating system, chooses a color, and presses the camera's shutter button. He does it again, this time choosing a line of code that turns the frames into a kaleidoscopic image. "This generation is so used to communicating with photography, Klein says. "They're snapping a picture and they're using a pre-packaged alteration made by some genius at Instagram and Snapchat.

Adobe's badassery in image processing is nothing new. With software like Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects and the likes, Adobe is hands-down the master of post-production. Now, Adobe has pushed for further innovation by adopting the technology everybody is talking about suddenly- artificial intelligence. The company has teamed up with researchers from University of Berkeley and come up with a new editing tool that makes use of machine learning to allow realistic manipulation of photos in real-time. In a paper named Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold, the researchers have outlined a new method to generate photo-realistic samples based only on a few brush strokes from the user.

Though it's an integral part of a properly functioning managerial relationship, feedback remains a sticky subject for many whose jobs require them to provide it. Some fear the backlash that may result, others worry that it may jeopardize their career, and still others fret that their feedback is getting completely ignored. In fact, a recent study by VitalSmarts found that 83% of employees have witnessed a colleague say something that has had a negative impact on their careers, something the study's authors referred to as "suicide by feedback." On the other hand, regular feedback is vital for employee engagement, which can lead to profitability and productivity increases of more than 20%, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll. So how can managers get over their fear of the repercussions while keeping their employees engaged?

Elpasolite is a glassy, transparent, shiny and soft mineral with a cubic crystal structure. First discovered in El Paso County (Colorado, USA), it can also be found in the Rocky Mountains, Virginia and the Apennines (Italy). In experimental databases, elpasolite is one of the most frequently found quaternary crystals (crystals made up of four chemical elements). Depending on its composition, it can be a metallic conductor, a semi-conductor or an insulator, and may also emit light when exposed to radiation. These characteristics make elpasolite an interesting candidate for use in scintillators (certain aspects of which can already be demonstrated) and other applications. Its chemical complexity means that, mathematically speaking, it is practically impossible to use quantum mechanics to predict every theoretically viable combination of the four elements in the structure of elpasolite.

Update: Machine Learning is Fun! Part 5 is now available! Also, don't forget to check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Have you noticed that Facebook has developed an uncanny ability to recognize your friends in your photographs? In the old days, Facebook used to make you to tag your friends in photos by clicking on them and typing in their name. This technology is called face recognition.

Splunk on Tuesday outlined new versions of its flagship suites with an emphasis on machine learning advances. The company updated Splunk Enterprise, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) and Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) for both cloud and on-premises deployments. Splunk's algorithms are focused on investigations for security incidents, alerting, predictive tools for operations and maintenance and business optimization for demand, inventory and analysis of historical data.

The company enlisted the name of the smartest person ever to brand its new platform-wide layer of artificial intelligence. While computer intelligence is not foreign to parts of Salesforce's clouds, this massive commitment means that advanced computer intelligence will now be embedded throughout the company's tools. And the company has made a major commitment to pushing the envelope. It is setting up an R&D lab, and it recently purchased pioneer BeyondCore, a data analysis platform so smart that it tells you the best questions to ask before answering them. Although Salesforce's announcement represents the biggest commitment thus far among marketing/sales tools, it is only part of the wave.

Love them or hate them, you'd better be prepared for these technologies to power the future of the B2B sales process. First, though, there are a few kinks that need to be worked out--or manners to be worked in, however you want to look at it. Don't think so? Don't be so quick to forget Microsoft's chatbot Tay, the millennial-esque chatbot that became the opposite of chill when it sent out a barrage of offensive, racist tweets back in March. What was the result of malicious hacking (and a sad ending for Tay) raised real questions that take far more than 140 snarky characters to answer: Can chatbots be both empowered to provide customer service and still be sensitive to human emotions? Some in the industry, like the co-founder of machine-learning startup Koko, say yes. The company is working to add empathy as a service to its chatbot-human interactions.