Venture capital investments in artificial intelligence (AI), one of the biggest technological trends these days, are booming. The year 2016 saw almost ten times more funds invested in the space than 2012 did. Virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR), sometimes associated with the creative side of AI, also became a hot topic: More than $1.8 billion was invested in AR/VR, compared with just $86 million in 2012. Applying AI to solve tasks normally considered creative has historical precedent. For example, procedural generation has been used to draw textures, produce 3D models, and automatically generate large amounts of content in video games since the 1980s.

Intel has announced that it plans to acquire the autonomous car hardware firm Mobileye for a cool $15 billion. It's a weighty sum, but the purchase gives Intel cutting-edge machine-learning technology that lies at the center of the nascent autonomous car industry. The buyout of Mobileye, one of our 50 Smartest Companies of 2016, is the second largest ever made by Intel. It's also by far the largest autonomous car acquisition to date, and another sign that the self-driving vehicle sector looks set to explode in the coming years. Many car manufacturers already use Mobileye's hardware to power their autonomous systems, giving the company a position of power throughout the industry.

The self-driving car space is getting increasingly more cutthroat. The sheer number of lawsuits filed recently are a testament to that. Tesla, for example, is suing its former Autopilot director Sterling Anderson. The lawsuit claims Anderson stole data for a competing venture, Aurora Innovations, that hasn't even come out of stealth mode yet. "In their zeal to play catch-up, traditional automakers have created a get-rich-quick environment. Small teams of programmers with little more than demoware have been bought for as much as a billion dollars. Cruise Automation, a 40-person firm, was purchased by General Motors in July 2016 for nearly $1 billion. In August 2016, Uber acquired Otto, another self-driving startup that had been founded only seven months earlier, in a deal worth more than $680 million."

Chatbots are services that mimic conversations with people in order to interact with your customers. Chatbots can be integrated with e-commerce platforms, allowing you to monetize your social media accounts and instant messaging profiles. All competitive companies must maintain a strong online presence, and chatbots are changing the way your audience interacts with you. They help you build an emotional bond with your customer, and because they are still new, building a chatbot now means a strategic advantage over the competition. There are two types of chatbots available: those that function based on rules and those that use artificial intelligence (A.I.).

For me, that raising the possibility of a massive failure mode in the future, the possibility that we create human or super human level AGI and we've got a whole world populated by super human level AGIs, none of whom is conscious. And that would be a world, could potentially be a world of great intelligence, no consciousness no subjective experience at all. Now, I think many many people, with a wide variety of views, take the view that basically subjective experience or consciousness is required in order to have any meaning or value in your life at all. So therefore, a world without consciousness could not possibly have a positive outcome. Maybe it wouldn't be a terribly negative outcome, it would just be an outcome, and among the worst possible outcomes.

Rajeev Rastogi, who heads the Machine Learning team at Amazon, explains how the global ecommerce giant employs Artificial Intelligence to improve the online shopping experience. Edited excerpts: In which areas does Amazon use AI? We are applying AI to a number of problems such as speech recognition, natural language understanding, question answering, dialog systems, product recommendations, product search, forecasting future product demand, among others. We have used Deep Learning to do better speech recognition. We use neural networks to convert speech (spoken by users) to text with very high accuracy.

The SXSW trade show floor was so filled with wonderful and weird products, companies and services, it made it hard to select what to check out. A fact that doesn't make that selection easier, is that tech companies have the tendency of selecting names that make no sense at all and don't say anything about what they do. So we set ourselves a challenge. Could we, as seasoned tech journalists, guess what startups do based only on their name? We set out to find out.

Amazon.com Inc has launched a new programme to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research, writes Jeffrey Dastin for Reuters. The e-commerce company said it is paying for a year-long doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum. Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation. Amazon, Alphabet Inc's Google and others are locked in a race to develop and monetise artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better faster a tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

"I, Robot", a movie from 2004 set in the year 2035 where humans and robots coexist, but the humanoid robots are really just assistants and labor workers for humans. These robots run on an AI supercomputer called V.I.K.I, but all it took is for V.I.K.I to become self aware and turn the robots on the humans, much like "Terminator" with SkyNet, but with a bit less violence. The year is 2017 and we are not yet at the point where we have AI mastered enough to create robots like those in "I, Robot" and "Terminator", but we are getting very close. The point is, we'll more than likely see robots like those in "I, Robot" before the year of the movie, 2035. The way the technology is going in AI and robotics, we could see mass produced AI equipped robot assistants as early as 2025.

You may want to think twice about your next search query, as Google's mobile messaging app might not keep it a secret. Allo, which includes Assistant, has been found to share people's search content in the middle of text conversations with other users. The flaw was discovered by Recode after a friend asked the bot a question, which answered with link from a previous search - but Google has since fixed the issue. Allo, which includes Assistant, has been found to share people's search content in the middle of text conversations with other users The flaw was discovered by Recode (pictured) after a friend asked the bot a question, which answered with link from a previous search Personal Assistant: Chats often involve making plans, and when this is the case Google Assistant can retrieve information on nearby restaurants, movie times and even the weather. Beyond planning, Google Assistant can give you the latest news and sports scores, translate phrases or do math calculations.