US-based tech giant Apple has now acquired Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based machine-learning startup that had been helping companies stock, process and visualizes big data with its unique software. With the India/US based company, Apple has now acquired three machine-learning companies within a short window of two years so as to expand its reach into artificial intelligence technology. According to a report on Techcrunch, the Shares of Apple (AAPL) had been continuously increasing in the afternoon trading on Thursday following the companies agreement to purchase Tuplejump, citing sources. Two co-founders of the Machine Learning startup (founded in 2013), Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu are already reported to have joined Apple while the third co-founder, Deepak Alur has joined Anaplan that is a Cloud-based business planning platform for finance, operations, and sales. Apple had been particularly interested in an open source project titled "FiloDB" that Tuplejump was currently working on so as to efficiently apply the machine learning concepts along with analytics to complex data.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for decades; Alan Turing first speculated that machines could one day think like humans back in the 1950s. But it's the combination of research breakthroughs, the wider availability of big data, and advances in graphics processing unit (GPU) technology that has ignited the AI explosion taking place today. When Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system beat South Korean champion Lee Se-dol at the ancient Chinese game Go in March 2016, it marked a turning point in AI's place in the public consciousness. Given that there are more possible Go positions than there are atoms in the universe, researchers had predicted it would be years before AI could become sophisticated enough to beat a human. AlphaGo used a form of AI called "deep learning" to master Go.

Many experts believe that artificial intelligence (AI) might lead to the end of the world--just not in the way that Hollywood films would have us believe. Movie plots, for example, feature robots increasing in intelligence until they take over the human race. The reality is far less dramatic, but may cause some incredible cultural shifts nonetheless. Last year, industry leaders like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates wrote a letter to the International Joint Conference in Argentina stating that the successful adoption of AI might be one of humankind's biggest achievements--and maybe its last. They noted that AI poses unique ethical dilemmas, which--if not considered carefully--could prove more dangerous than nuclear capabilities.

It's pretty much universally agreed that we shouldn't give AI-powered robots rocket launchers and set them loose to battle each other to the death. Luckily, we can recreate that in a video game. Facebook and Intel took home 1st place prizes today (Sept. The 1993 video game, in which a player fights the scourge of hell, has become a touchstone for AI research for its simple 3D maps and potential for different styles of play. Facebook, which competed under the team name F1, took home the (figurative) gold medal in the competition's first challenge, where AIs are armed with rocket launchers on a map they've seen before. The goal was simple: kill each other.

We may need to start rewriting our precious lawyer jokes -- smart, time-saving computers are quickly elevating the profession. Instead of hiring expensive assistants to pore over cases and sort through tickets, law firms are increasingly turning toward artificially-intelligent machines to do the expensive menial jobs instead. They are creating a future in which a costly and inefficient legal system actually becomes an attractive way for the average citizen to protect his or her civil liberties. Andrew Arruda, the CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence, tells Tech Insider that "AI-enabled software is going to become very much the status quo and very normal" in the coming decade. Arruda's company recently deployed the ROSS software at a handful of law firms throughout the US.

Google's open-source code release uses its third-gen "Inception" model and a new vision system that's better at picking out individual objects in a shot. "For example, an image classification model will tell you that a dog, grass and a frisbee are in the image, but a natural description should also tell you the color of the grass and how the dog relates to the frisbee," the team wrote. After it was trained using human captions, Google's system was able to describe images it hasn't seen before. "Excitingly, our model does indeed develop the ability to generate accurate new captions when presented with completely new scenes, indicating a deeper understanding of the objects and context in the images," the researchers say. Using several photos of dogs on beach (above), for instance, it was able to generate a caption for a similar, but slightly different scene.

Let's be honest, stupid humans are too smart sometimes for their own good and Skynet is going to happen, at least that's what Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think, but what do they know? In 2014, Stephen Hawking wrote: "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history, – Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets." In a separate interview in the same year, he warned: "humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded by A.I." In a Reddit Q&A Session in January 2015 Gates said: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

Apple says their voice recognition app Siri is improved. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham puts Siri through a few tests to find out. Siri's closest Indian restaurant turned out to be in San Jose, California, just a 6 hour drive from Los Angeles (Photo: Robert Hanashiro) LOS ANGELES -- Hey, Siri: if you can't find me an Indian restaurant just three miles from my office, what can you get right? With the IOS 10 mobile operating system upgrade, Apple has promised us that its five-year-old personal digital assistant Siri would be better than ever, and would expand beyond the core Apple apps to also work with third-party apps like LinkedIn, Uber and Pinterest. The results of my tests is that Siri is slightly improved, but only if you take the time to enunciate correctly and slowly, and teach the voice-activated assistant what you want.

This summer, the Google X lab launched a balloon into the stratosphere over Peru, and it stayed there for 98 days. Launching balloons into the stratosphere is a usual thing for the Google X lab--or just X, as it's now called after spinning off from Google and nestling under the new umbrella called Alphabet. X is home to Project Loon, an effort to beam the Internet from the stratosphere down to people here on Earth. The hope is that these balloons can fly over areas of the globe where the Internet is otherwise unavailable and stay there long enough to provide people with a reliable connection. But there's a problem: balloons tend to float away.

It's great to be an AI developer right now, but maybe not a good time to have a job that can be done by a machine. Take image captioning -- Google has released its "Show and Tell" algorithm to developers, who can train it recognize objects in photos with up to 93.9 percent accuracy. That's a significant improvement from just two years ago, when it could correctly classify 89.6 percent of images. Better photo descriptions can be used in numerous ways to help historians, visually impaired folks, and of course, other AI researchers, to name a few examples. Google's open-source code release uses its third-gen "Inception" model and a new vision system that's better at picking out individual objects in a shot.