Facebook today release new statistics on the growth of chatbots on its Messenger app and announced new features related to chatbots. Since the chatbot platform launched in April, more than 11,000 bots have been added to Messenger, Facebook vice president of messaging products David Marcus wrote in a Facebook post. For some context, in May, Marcus said that "tens of thousands" of developers were working on Messenger bots. Also, more than 23,000 people have created accounts for the Bot Engine tool from wit.ai, Facebook's natural language processing service for developers, Marcus wrote. And Facebook now lets users rate Messenger chatbots, from one to five stars, and write reviews.

A pilot A.I. developed by a doctoral graduate from the University of Cincinnati has shown that it can not only beat other A.I.s, but also a professional fighter pilot with decades of experience. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully evaded retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene "Geno" Lee, and shot him down every time. In a statement, Lee called it "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible A.I. I've seen to date." The fact that an AI downed a professional fighter pilot? Or the fact that the AI was developed by a graduate student?

The rise of the machines continues this week with news that the Associated Press (AP) is expanding its baseball coverage through automated stories generated by algorithms. The New York-based nonprofit news agency has ramped up its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, Carolina-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and transform big data into stories. The AP has worked with Automated Insights for a number of years already, with more than 3,000 computer-generated corporate earnings reports created over the past couple of years based on data supplied by Zacks Investment Research, and it has used automation in sports reports too. The AP also participated in a 5.5 million funding round into Automated Insights back in 2014. Automated Insights offers its Wordsmith A.I. platform to a number of big-name media companies, including Yahoo, and to the casual observer it may be difficult to know that a report wasn't written by a human.

Over the years, a world full of supermarkets and shopping malls has desensitized our relationship with the environment and each other. We no longer know where our food or clothes come from, and the cashier will only make eye contact to take our payment. By contrast, when shopping online, it seems that almost every website knows all of our preferences in a personalized experience. FiveStars is a loyalty and shopping analytics platform for small brick-and-mortar retailers that aims to restore the balance. FiveStars has logged more than 35 million visits from 10 million consumers who have used the loyalty app through over 10,000 merchants.

Professor Stephen Hawking says he believes pollution and human "stupidity" remain the biggest threats to mankind, while also expressing his concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The world's leading theoretical physicist argued "we have certainly not become less greedy or less stupid" in our treatment of the environment over the past decade, during an interview on Larry King Now, which is hosted on Ora TV. Professor Hawking said: "Six years ago, I was warning about pollution and overcrowding, they have gotten worse since then. The population has grown by half a billion since our last interview, with no end in sight. "At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.

If you're old enough to have had an AOL Instant Messenger account, then you may remember Jill020306, a curious teenager who kept getting creepy phone calls she couldn't resist answering. As part of the marketing campaign for the 2006 horror flick When A Stranger Calls, the ad agency Universal McCann built a chatbot that would play the part of Jill Johnson in an AOL Instant Messenger conversation. What's old is new again and today Sequel, "the chatbot platform that enables creators and brands to build conversational personas for entertainment and media," has launched an experience to help market Now You See Me 2. Things have changed, technologically and otherwise, in the past ten years. Sequel's bot focuses on Kik and Facebook Messenger, not AOL. Besides the platform changing, the bigger question worth answering is, has the technology powering chatbots improved to a point where they might offer something more than a mildly amusing piece of marketing campaign?

The fatal crash of a Model S that was in autopilot when it collided with a truck in Florida is prompting a preliminary evaluation of the feature by the National Highway Transportation Safety Board.

Sequencing is a task for children that aims to improve understanding of the temporal occurrence in a sequence of events, so that they sort various images (sometimes with captions) into a coherent story. Researchers from Virginia Tech and TTI Chicago have proposed the task of machine-learning sequencing – given a jumbled set of aligned image-caption pairs that belong to a story, the task is that the computer needs to sort them in a way that they form a consistent story. They have used stories from the Sequential Image Narrative Dataset where a set of 5 aligned image-caption pairs together form a coherent story, and given a jumbled input story, they have trained machine-learning models to sort them. They have proposed a task of visual story sequencing and implemented two approaches to solve the task. The first one is based on individual story elements to predict the position, and the other one is based on the pairwise story elements to predict the relative order of the story elements.

Watching the AI machine AlphaGo defeat the world Go champion Lee Se-dol, one might have felt a disturbed or even sinister force at work. What can we do to coexist with such a potentially powerful AI? After the shock of AlphaGo's victory, responses about the situation are divided. One says that Korea should focus more on developing artificial intelligence. The other says that we should support and reinforce tasks that only humans can do such as creative problem solving and education.

Artificial intelligence that can understand and answer any work-related question it is asked has been made available in the UK for the first time. The computer software, called Starmind, uses machine learning to understand queries, then source answers from previous staff conversations on a subject or track down experts within the company who are able to help. Its creators refer to it as'brain technology', adding its aim is to become a central knowledge bank within any company, an instant database of information that can be accessed by anyone. Artificial intelligence software which understands and answers work-related questions has been made available in the UK. Starmind co-founder Pascal Kaufmann said of the technology: 'Thousands of human brains connected can outsmart any machine today.