By happy circumstance, Santa Clara-based chip maker NVIDIA finds itself in the position of being an artificial intelligence (AI) startup king maker. The company designs and manufactures the entire computing platform for deep learning, the fastest growing field in AI, building everything from graphics processing units (GPUs) to software to systems purpose-built for deep learning. As the name might suggest, GPUs were developed to improve the computer graphics experience by offloading certain computationally intense image processing tasks from the standard central processing unit (CPU). The particular strength of a GPU is performing large numbers of parallel floating point calculations. This helps computer screens to increase in detail and complexity without sacrificing system performance, and modern gaming would not be possible without it.

Intel has introduced a quadcopter called Aero at its annual developers conference, and we'll bet you can guess its target audience based on the event. That's right, Aero was specifically designed not for hobbyists or for commercial purposes, but for developers who want to create and test apps for drones. The company said it's the "fastest path available from Intel for developers to get applications airborne." Aero is powered by an Atom processor and comes equipped with Intel's RealSense camera for vision. It's also preloaded with AirMap, an app that tells you where you can and can't fly, gives you real-time info on wildfires and the like, as well as gives you an easy way to plot routes.

Nasa launches million dollar contest to create'Valkyrie' AI robot that will accompany astronauts on ... Will Content Marketing Die To Robotic AI?

Zoltan Istvan, who represents the Transhumanist Party and bills himself as "the science candidate" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has garnered more media coverage than many third party candidates, with recent mentions in Vocativ, The Verge, USA Today, and Pacific Standard. He also writes regularly for Motherboard and The Huffington Post. Istvan's popularity is likely due to a combination of his quirky campaign style (he drives around in a bus painted to resemble a coffin with "Science vs. The Coffin" written above the bumper) and an unconventional platform that pushes for gene editing, human life extension, and morphological freedom (the right to do anything to your body so long as it doesn't harm others). As a broader movement, transhumanism focuses on leveraging science and technology toward the ultimate goal of overcoming death, largely through as-yet-unproven methods such as mind uploading, in which a person's entire consciousness would be transferred to a digital system or machine.

When Google's AlphaGo computer defeated a human champion in the insanely complex board game "Go" in March, experts were surprised by the computer's ability to recognize patterns and make quick, instinctive decisions – otherwise known to humans as intuition. Intuition, or gut instinct, is one of many hallmarks of business decision-making. Steve Jobs had no concrete evidence that the iPhone would be a success, but he saw patterns in the market, and in his mind, that convinced him that consumers would want it. AlphaGo's programmers set out to imitate that sense of intuition by first loading 150,000 prior matches between good players into the computer. Then they had AlphaGo play against itself endlessly.

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

Nasa launches million dollar contest to create'Valkyrie' AI robot that will accompany astronauts on ...

FILE - In this Thursday, March 26, 2015, file photo, Ford President and CEO Mark Fields speaks during the inauguration of Ford's manufacturing facility and engine plant at Sanand, near Ahmadabad, India. Fields said Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2016, that Ford Motor Co. will have a fully autonomous vehicle ready to provide ride-hailing or ride-sharing services by 2021. DETROIT (AP) -- Ford Motor Co. intends to have a fully driverless vehicle -- no steering wheel, no pedals -- on the road within five years. The car will initially be used for commercial ride-hailing or ride-sharing services, with sales to consumers coming later. "This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company," said CEO Mark Fields, as he announced the plan Tuesday at Ford's Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California.

Growing up in his grandmother's staunchly Catholic home in Cali, Colombia, Anthony Rivera never dreamed he'd become king of the Latin American nudie business. Soft-spoken and timid, Rivera was more comfortable working on computer science assignments than approaching girls. "I'd get stressed about meeting women," he recounts from his 12th-floor apartment in Medellín's posh El Poblado neighborhood. Even today, his role running a major adult webcam company seems incongruous with his diffidence -- but that might also be the key ingredient to his success. Rivera, born and partially raised in New York, has been instrumental in taking Colombia's webcam industry from the shadows to the second-largest webcam model market in the world, after Romania.

Perhaps nothing is better fodder for an argument in IT, especially when competitors are locking horns over undiscovered country. Over at the Nvidia Blog, Ian Buck is taking umbrage at Intel's recent performance claims around machine learning, saying that they are out-of-date. According to Buck, Intel is comparing its new Intel Xeon Phi processor against outdated GPUs using Nvidia's Maxwell architecture. Nvidia has since introduced products based on the Pascal architecture, which helped propel the company to some nice profits in their most recent quarter. Few fields are moving faster right now than deep learning," writes Buck. "Today's neural networks are 6x deeper and more powerful than just a few years ago.