Toyota Motor Corp is targeting developing in the next five years driver assistance systems that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to improve vehicle safety, the head of its advanced research division said. Gill Pratt, CEO of recently set up Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Japanese automaker's research and development company that focuses on AI, said it aims to improve car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations. Toyota has said the institute will spend 1 billion over the next five years, as competition to develop self-driving cars intensifies. Earlier this month, home rival Honda Motor Co said it was setting up a new research body which would focus on artificial intelligence, joining other global automakers which are investing in robotics research, including Ford and Volkswagen AG . "Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I'm very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years," Pratt told reporters late last week in comments embargoed for Monday.

As in other industries, business leaders in the automotive and financial-services industries have an urgent need for trusted and actionable real-world insights that can help them know and serve their customers better while enabling rapid innovation. Too often, however, executives have had to operate with uncertain, incomplete, and inconsistent information. Now advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made the construction of data-based real-world models and simulations a reality. A 2015 Tech Pro Research survey indicated that 24 percent of businesses across industries are currently using AI or had plans to do so within the year. While the health-care sector has been among the leading adopters of AI, financial-services and automotive companies are also increasingly turning to assisted, augmented, and autonomous intelligence.

We now have at least three warnings about Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) over the last few months that have been validated by recent events. In April, before Apple released earnings, we noted that social data aggregator LikeFolio had put out a sell rating on the stock based on their analysis of social media data, and we presented a couple ways for concerned shareholders to hedge if they wanted to stay long (Hedging Apple Ahead Of Earnings). When we plot "purchase intent mentions" for Apple on a 30 day moving average, we see a steady erosion over the past 4-6 months. We also have seen FAR lower purchase intent mentions surrounding Apple's new product releases than prior (even comparably minor) product releases. In an article last month (Apple: The Next BlackBerry?), we shared Marco Arment's warning about Apple slipping behind in AI (artificial intelligence).

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction. The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren't wrong; AI is coming.

Twitter's famous blue bird is getting some equine company. The messaging platform announced today (June 20) that it acquired Magic Pony Technology, a startup based in London that applies machine learning to video, for an undisclosed sum. Its acquisition looks like Twitter's latest attempt to reverse its slumping fortunes by boosting its efforts in the increasingly hot artificial intelligence space. Investors appear relieved: Twitter stock was up 1.5% in early trading. But don't expect this deal to produce yet another digital assistant with an anodyne female moniker.

Twitter has bought London-based AI startup Magic Pony Technology for a reported 150m ( 102m) as the company moves to strengthen its position in image-sharing, video, and live video. Founded in 2014, Magic Pony uses machine learning to build improved systems for visual processing. The company said it was excited to be joining forces with Twitter "to improve the visual experiences that are delivered across their apps". Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, said Magic Pony's technology would be used to enhance live and video offerings and "opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter". Dorsey said the team included "11 PhDs with expertise across computer vision, machine learning, high-performance computing and computational neuroscience".

A pony is joining the flock. Twitter has acquired Magic Pony Technology, a London-based startup focused on machine learning and visual technology, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Monday. The less than 2-year-old startup has been building and training neural networks to process and improve the visualization of video. The team has created a system to improve low-resolution video and has demonstrated it for live video game streaming, MIT Technology Review reported this year. That type of video conversion technology is key for Twitter as it focuses on live video.

Twitter has acquired Magic Pony, a London-based firm that has developed technology to improve video shot on smartphones and shared online. The company specializes in machine learning, the ability of computers to use built-in artificial intelligence to improve output. In the case of Magic Leap, that involves improved processing of video so that clips and live feeds look better shared on Twitter. Magic Pony had developed "novel machine learning techniques for visual processing," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a Twitter blog post announcing the acquisition Monday. "Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter. It's powering much of the work we're doing to make it easier to create, share, and discover the very best content so that every time you open Twitter you're immersed in the most relevant news, stories, and events for you."

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp is targeting developing in the next five years driver assistance systems that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to improve vehicle safety, the head of its advanced research division said. Gill Pratt, CEO of recently set up Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Japanese automaker's research and development company that focuses on AI, said it aims to improve car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations. Toyota has said the institute will spend 1 billion over the next five years, as competition to develop self-driving cars intensifies. Earlier this month, home rival Honda Motor Co said it was setting up a new research body which would focus on artificial intelligence, joining other global automakers which are investing in robotics research, including Ford and Volkswagen AG VOWG_p.DE . "Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I'm very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years," Pratt told reporters late last week in comments embargoed for Monday.

This week at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC '16) we are expecting a wave of vendors and high performance computing pros to blur the borders between traditional supercomputing and what is around the corner on the application front--artificial intelligence and machine learning. For some, merging those two areas is a stretch, but for others, particularly GPU maker, Nvidia, which just extended its supercomputing/deep learning roadmap this morning, the story is far more direct since much of the recent deep learning work has hinged on GPUs for training of neural networks and machine learning algorithms. We have written extensively over the last year about how GPUs are being used in both deep learning and in HPC separately, but we might soon arrive at a fuller merger between the two areas, at least from a systems and hardware perspective. "Deep learning is not just an application segment, it's a whole new computing model," Ian Buck, VP of Accelerated Computing, tells The Next Platform. "If you had asked me at the launch of CUDA if GPUs would be in the largest supercomputers or revolutionizing artificial intelligence, I would have said that was a vision or even a pipe dream."