These are exciting times in the world of artificial intelligence as advanced capabilities escape the labs and become central to mainstream products -- think Amazon Echo -- and increasingly accessible to everyday software developers. Recently, we've seen a run of large companies open-sourcing their A.I. platform APIs. Google has open-sourced TensorFlow, its machine learning library. Not to be outdone, Amazon has released its TensorFlow competitor DSSTNE (or Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network) and Facebook has done the same with fastText, its machine learning engine for text classification and language recognition. Those big-company A.I. platforms join -- and in some sense compete with -- notable open source deep learning libraries like Caffe, Theano and Torch.

This Wednesday, the tech billionaire investor announced an investment in Luminance, a newly launched startup that uses artificial technology to read contracts in order help law firms with the arduous process of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It's not a "sexy" piece of technology, Lynch argues -- but one that has huge implications for the way we live our lives, and is indicative of a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence. What this is is probably an example of what's going to be changing a lot of things. If you can get machine technology to be reading contracts, it's going to be changing a lot of the world around us ... you're seeing the beginning of a new age." He has since founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital -- the vehicle through which the investment in Luminance was made. This week, Business Insider sat down with the investor to discuss Luminance, Brexit, his augmented reality plans, and why he likes having an "unfair advantage." Mike Lynch is an investor in Luminance -- but was also instrumental in helping create it. "The bit that makes it possible is the machine learning, and that was being done by some research people at Cambridge, and I actually have a connection because my PhD a long, long time ago was in machine learning," Lynch said. "I was introduced to them, and what they were doing looked great, but I said to them'look, you gotta go and meet some real world people.' "So they started getting real data and they met up with [law firm] Slaughter and May, and basically the machine learnt from Slaughter and May how to do these thing and at that point they made a little company. They got a CEO who is a lady who'd actually been involved in a lot of M&A deals over their career and we funded it, and it's been developing the product, and today it comes out into the bright lights of day."

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md -- In comments that conjure up dystopian images of a future dominated by robot soldiers controlled by Skynet, researchers with the Pentagon's futuristic think tank said they are working on better ways to merge the rapid decision making of computers with the analytical capabilities of humans. In fact, scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency, or DARPA, are even looking into advanced neuroscience in hopes of one day merging computerized artificial intelligence with the human brain. "I think the future [of] warfighting is going to look a lot more like less incredibly smart people working with more incredibly smart machines," said DARPA Deputy Director Steve Walker during a briefing with reporters at the 2016 Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference here. "And how those two things come together is going to define how we move forward." Walker said researchers are already finding ways to help machines better collaborate with human operators.

ReplyBuy, a finalist in the 1st and Future competition, wants to use the text message to get you tickets for sporting events. The current version of ReplyBuy works like this -- the company sends a text message to all San Francisco 49ers fans; whoever replies "Buy Now" the fastest gets the tickets. Today, the company is making the platform immensely more useful with the launch of ReplyBuy.ai. Indeed, ReplyBuy is introducing artificial intelligence to the sports and entertainment vertical. Instead of just receiving text messages when tickets are available, users will now be able to send a text message with a request to buy tickets for whichever event they want; the chatbot will ask a few follow-up questions, like "how many tickets do you want?" and "what's your price range."

Will we cure cancer using artificial intelligence? Microsoft is one of the growing number of major technology companies betting on it. The company announced Monday the efforts of its various research labs that are using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other computer science to help doctors research, diagnose, track, and potentially cure various types of cancer. Microsoft is effectively using artificial intelligence to solve a very human problem. One team is helping oncologists use natural language processing to sift through cancer research.

A subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, Jigsaw, is using machine learning to fend off online trolling, reports Wired. The New York–based think tank is building open-source AI tools, collectively called Conversation AI, to filter out harassment and abusive language. "Few things poison conversations online more than abusive language, threats, and harassment," reads the Conversation AI website. "We're studying how computers can learn to understand the nuances and context of abusive language at scale. If successful, machine learning could help publishers and moderators improve comments on their platforms and enhance the exchange of ideas on the internet."

NEW YORK--Is your privacy potentially in peril when using Google's new Allo messaging app? The app, which Google began making available to iOS and Android users on Wednesday, features a secure end-to-end encrypted "Incognito mode" feature that enables you to keep a conversation hush-hush. And you can dispose of such messages automatically in seconds should you so choose to make them disappear. By default, however, your regular chat logs are stored on Google's servers until you actively decide to delete them. The Verge has reported that this a policy about-face from what Google said its intention was last May at the Google I/O conference where Allo was first announced. Allo is built around machine learning and artificial intelligence, which drives the new Google Assistant, and helps serve up "smart reply" buttons inside your chats that are meant to be shortcuts to what Google anticipates you might want to respond with next.

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When you see an action picture, say a ball in mid-air or a car driving on the highway in the middle of the desert, your mind is very good at filling in the blanks. Namely, it's a no-brainer that the ball is going to hit the ground or the car will continue to drive in the direction it's facing. For a machine, though, predicting what happens next can be very difficult. In fact, many experts in the field of artificial intelligence think this is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle which when completed might usher in the age of thinking machines. Not reactive, calculated machines like we have today -- real thinking machines that in many ways are indistinguishable from us.

For orchestrating workloads on Azure ML (Machine Learning) batch execution web services, Azure Data Factory supports a built-in activity, namely Azure ML Batch Execution activity. Customers can leverage this activity to operationalize their ML models at scale. Little while ago, Azure ML added support to allow multiple Web Service Inputs for a given experiment. Consequently, customers have been looking to leverage this capability through Azure Data Factory. Data Factory now supports configuring the ML Batch Execution Activity to pass multiple Web Service Inputs to the ML web service.