What do you get when you cross self-driving artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, and public transportation? Local Motors, a manufacturer known for its focus on open-source vehicle designs, unveiled Olli on Thursday at its new facility in National Harbor, Md., a development just outside Washington D.C. To test Olli, Local Motors plans to offer free rides to the public around the development in what is believed to be the first public trial of a completely self-driving vehicle in the United States, reported The Washington Post. In February, the Netherlands launched a fleet of WEpod driverless buses, which can carry six passengers, on the campus of Wageningen University in a central Dutch agricultural town. Miami-Dade County has bought two Olli shuttles, and Las Vegas has bought one.

Last month Google revealed that it's making its own custom artificial intelligence processing chips. Now it turns out that you may already be using them. The chips are called TPUs, short for Tensor Processing Unit, named for Google's open source AI framework, TensorFlow. Today at the 2016 WIRED Business Conference in New York City, the head of Google's cloud business, Diane Greene, said that Google is already using TPUs in more than 100 projects. These include Android's voice recognition system, the "Smart Reply" feature of its Inbox app, and Google's new cross-application search service Springboard--in short, stuff you may already be using.

Local Motors officially introduced "Olli" -- a self-driving mini bus that incorporates IBM's Watson artificial intelligence (AI) platform to deal with customers. The IBM's AI service will not be used to operate the self-driving car, and will instead answer customer queries about the route and whether they have time to stop for coffee on the way. The self-driving electric vehicle will have the capacity to transport as many as 12 individuals at a time. Local Motors is known for creating the world's first 3D-printed car, and it has collaborated with IBM Corporation (NYSE:IBM) to introduce an equally innovative concept with its latest feature. The company unveiled Olli -- the brainchild of vehicle designer Edgar Sarmiento -- at the launch of its new facility in National Harbor, MD.

If that sounds familiar, it's because Google and Facebook have since also announced similar plans to integrate chatbots into their messaging apps. Facebook Messenger, for instance, already has bots that let you send flowers, get breaking news and go shopping without leaving the app. Wand Labs would boost Microsoft's ability to offer more in this space, given the former's experience with "third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces," according to Microsoft. Wand has shut down its messaging app, but screenshots on its website show its ability to pull up third-party services such as Yelp and YouTube from its keyboard. With the Wand application, you could even share access to apps such as Nest's smart thermostat app so the friends you're chatting with can change the temperature for themselves.

Image recognition, determining all the objects within a photo, is something Facebook's AI does with relative ease. The company's approach to machine learning is called deep learning, a popular route to AI also followed by Google and others. Deep learning employs algorithms to recognize patterns, learn from those patterns and complete sophisticated tasks. For Facebook, it could be tagging friends. For Google, it may be creating a program that plays the game Go well enough to beat human champions.

Companies like Clearpath, Fetch, and Locus Robotics are doing some amazing work in order fulfillment and other warehouse tasks by developing mobile platforms that can autonomously and intelligently ferry items between locations. We don't want to minimize how much of a challenge this is, but at the same time, it's only half of the order fulfillment problem (and not the most difficult half). The hard part is getting those robots to pick items from shelves, and apparently it's really hard: Amazon (whose warehouse robots are capable of tranporting items but not picking them) is holding its second Picking Challenge at RoboCup this year, and even with teams of researchers all collaborating on picking tasks with very expensive robots, results have been good but not inspiring. German startup Magazino is another company trying to solve both problems. It has begun deploying a mobile warehouse robot called Toru designed to not only transport items but also pick them (some of them, anyway) directly off of shelves. They haven't completely solved the problem of humans, but it's a step in the right direction.

Google is diving deeper into artificial intelligence, with the company opening a dedicated machine learning research center in its Zurich office, the search company announced on Thursday, June 16. The Google Research Europe center will focus on three areas: Machine intelligence, natural language processing, and understanding and machine perception. The research center aims to deliver machine learning that can be put into practical use, to improve the machine learning infrastructure, and to assist the research community overall. "Google's ongoing research in machine intelligence is what powers many of the products being used by hundreds of millions of people a day -- from Translate to Photo Search to Smart Reply for Inbox," Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research Europe, wrote in the blog post announcing the center. Mogenet noted machine learning software engineers and researchers will be able to develop products and conduct research at the Zurich center, which also holds the largest Google engineering office outside of the US.

I recently attended #alt-ai, a mini conference on Art and MI organized by Gene Kogan and folks at the School for Poetic Computation (sfpc) in New York City. The event took place in a building that was previously occupied by Bell Labs and was the location of 9 evenings almost 50 years ago. The building later became the Westbeth Artist community (home to many influential and successful artists over the years) and is now home to sfpc. The first day started with a gallery opening (about 14 pieces, many shown on Openframe.io) Gene Kogan gave an intro and a bird's eye view of the sudden explosion of interest in this field over the last year.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Many of the tech industry's biggest players are currently working to address the chatbot trend, but few are investing more into the effort than Microsoft. The company joined the fray early on with Cortana and is now doubling down by acquiring a low-called startup called Wand Labs Inc. that has developed its own virtual assistant for mobile devices. The software attempts to spare users the hassle of switching between apps by making it possible to interact with every service on their phones through a centralized chat window. The built-in bot can be instructed to find a restaurant on Yelp, add a song to an iTunes playlist and even change the settings on connected devices like the Nest Thermostat. It's an appealing value proposition, but Redmond appears to be more interested in the Wand team.