Two important milestones were achieved within recent 15 days. Milestone 1: The first driverless taxi fleet is already operational in Pittsburgh. On September 14, Uber announced that the world's first Self-Driving Ubers are now on the road in the Steel City of Pittsburgh. As the company explains "We're inviting our most loyal Pittsburgh customers to experience the future first. If a Self-Driving Uber is available, we'll send it along with a safety driver up front to make sure the ride goes smoothly. Otherwise it's uberX as usual…This pilot is a big step forward. Real-world testing is critical to the success of this technology. And creating a viable alternative to individual car ownership is important to the future of cities".

Wave Computing will describe a chip that can train neural networks ten times faster than Nvidia--s top GPUs while consuming the same power. Wave's chip is one of a handful of announcements at next week's Linley Processor Conference. Also at the event, Ceva will describe a new DSP core for computer vision, Adesto will detail a NOR chip that can handle both storage and execute code and ARM will announce a new member of its family of on-chip interconnects. The news comes at a time of growing specialization in microprocessor design, according to the event's host, veteran chip analyst Linley Gwennap. "In the 1970's and '80's people created a lot of different architectures, but over the past 20 years work has consolidated more on to ARM and x86," said Gwennap, principal of the Linley Group.

As if quantum computing wasn't mind-bending enough, one of D-Wave Systems' founders is now pursuing another futuristic idea: using artificial intelligence and high-tech exoskeleton suits to allow humans--and, at least according to one description of the technology, monkeys, too--to control and train an army of intelligent robots. Geordie Rose is a co-founder and chief technology officer of D-Wave, the Canadian company selling machines that it claims exploit quantum mechanical effects to solve certain problems hundreds of millions times faster than traditional computers. Now an IEEE Spectrum investigation has discovered that Rose is also CEO of Kindred Systems (aka Kindred AI), a stealthy startup he founded with others in 2014 dedicated to delivering advanced teleoperated and autonomous robots. The goal is making programming robots faster and less costly–and possibly revolutionize the world of work. Kindred has so far received well over 10 million in funding, according to Data Collective, the venture capital firm that led one of the rounds.

As bot technology improves, businesses finding their way into more use cases where human judgment and effort have traditionally been required. Some relevant business use cases are assistant bots, finance compliance, supplementing HR practices etc. The use cases can be classified and explained in terms of automation and augmentation. Automation of routine tasks can improve overall productivity and performance. Augmentation bots powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing are better than humans at switching task and sifting through gigabytes of data.

The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is a single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops that up to 2013 were held at ski resorts. According to Microsoft Academic Search, NIPS is the top conference on machine learning. US tops the chart and has been the top research contributor with the highest number of accepts. UK stands second with an marginal increase in paper accepts from 2014, whereas India and China both dropped, with lesser number of accepts in 2015.

Google is known for seemingly wild investments like stratospheric Internet balloons and face computers. This week it began a project that is less flashy but bolder: rethinking the conventional search engine that has become embedded into daily life and provided the revenue that made Google into a 546 billion behemoth. On Wednesday the company launched a virtual helper similar to Apple's Siri. Called Google Assistant, the awkwardly named aide exists only as a "preview" inside Google's new messaging app Allo, and early impressions show that it still needs work. But Google is committed to rolling out Assistant much more widely, in a bid to make us as dependent on it as we are on the search box.

Robots assisted by artificial intelligence may eliminate 6 percent of all U.S. jobs by 2021, according to a new analysis by Forrester. "Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services," read part of the analyst firm's report, as quoted by The Guardian. Many of these industries already seem on the verge of technological disruption. Otto, a young startup run by engineers from Google's autonomous-vehicle project (and recently acquired by Uber for 670 million), is testing out self-driving trucks. If all goes according to plan, humans won't entirely cede control of their big rigs to software; rather, the technology will take over at periodic intervals so that drivers can catch some shut-eye. It's also not impossible to imagine a future in which trucks lack drivers altogether.

Customer support is one the most resource-intensive departments in a company. Staff spend their day answering queries, on the telephone with customers, communicating with other departments, and much more. It is also a part of the operation that is hard to link to an ROI. Although the concept of "customer success" is gaining traction in the startup world (particularly in SaaS), it is still tough to report the real value a customer support team can deliver. Therefore, anything reducing the need for manpower in customer support is considered a good thing.

London-based Almax Analytics has launched a news analysis tool for financial markets, it has announced. The solution "works like a human" by combining natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and network and data visualisation to help clients act on news and social media.

Much as the steam engine helped power the Industrial Revolution, semiconductors are in many ways the backbone that power today's information revolution. A semiconductor is a microchip that allows any computing device to carry out the instructions a program sets forth. The size of the semiconductor industry should continue to climb with the levels of technology in our daily lives, though the growth won't be evenly distributed. This is a diverse industry, but for now let's focus on some of the more compelling opportunities for investors in the semiconductor space today. QCT, the chip business, dominates revenue production, having generated between 68% and 71% of Qualcomm's total sales in each of the past three fiscal years.