Like any proud father, Gary Marcus is only too happy to talk about the latest achievements of his two-year-old son. More unusually, he believes that the way his toddler learns and reasons may hold the key to making machines much more intelligent. Sitting in the boardroom of a bustling Manhattan startup incubator, Marcus, a 45-year-old professor of psychology at New York University and the founder of a new company called Geometric Intelligence, describes an example of his boy's ingenuity. From the backseat of the car, his son had seen a sign showing the number 11, and because he knew that other double-digit numbers had names like "thirty-three" and "seventy-seven," he asked his father if the number on the sign was "onety-one." "He had inferred that there is a rule about how you put your numbers together," Marcus explains with a smile.

People don't want cars, they want rides. And they're scrambling to do something about it. Just months after GM poured money into Lyft (the one with the pink mustasche), Toyota and Volkswagen both said today they were joining up with other ride-hailing rivals. Toyota, meanwhile, is partnering with Uber to, among other things, let people automatically deduct their car payments from the fares they make as Uber drivers. Clearly automakers have Silicon Valley envy.

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

Big Communications Event -- Masergy is working on its app store, which will allow customers to decide when they need a different type of firewall or another virtual router. Currently, the company has five apps but CEO and Chairman Chris MacFarland said they would have more than 100 over the next 24 months. Masergy Communications Inc. MacFarland spoke about the key elements that service providers need to have in place in order to deliver a better customer experience during his keynote address Tuesday morning here at BCE. MacFarland talked about the importance of automation using APIs and forward-facing web services. "Then you combine that automation with the fact that we are in a world today where machine learning is now a reality," MacFarland said. "We use it today in our managed security service where it allows us to literally look at billions of pieces of information per day and then predict the behavior of all of the machine-to-machine communications for our customers."

We often take for granted how easy it is for us to complete basic tasks just using our hands. Typing out an email or setting up a pot of coffee are things we can do bleary eyed in the morning, but the movements our hands have to make to complete such tasks are truly complex, human skills. That's why for robots to advance to the point where they can take care of our elderly or help clean our homes, it will be necessary for their hands to demonstrate the same level of finesse ours do. Researchers at the University of Washington are inching closer to making that a reality. Their software system, dubbed the Adroit manipulation system, is powering a robot hand that is considered one of the most highly capable in the world.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division.. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. Application intelligence is the process of using machine learning technology to create apps that use historical and real-time data to make predictions and decisions to deliver rich, adaptive, personalized experiences for users. We believe that every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. The armies of chat bots and virtual assistants, the e-commerce sites that show the right recommendations at the right time and the latest dating apps are all built to learn and create continuously improving experiences. In addition, legacy applications are becoming more and more intelligent to compete and keep pace with this new wave of applications. We have spent time thinking about the various ways intelligent apps emerge -- and how they are built.

Messaging apps are taking over. Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Kik are growing at an unprecedented scale as people abandon the plethora of apps on their phone. Why fill your phone with'one task' apps when you can do all you need with just one? In WeChat you can hail a cab, pay for it, order wine, send a friend your location and some Bitcoin, and catch up on the news among other amazing things. New Chatbots launch hourly into these text messaging apps.

China will speed up the development of its artificial intelligence (AI) sector and create a market worth more than 100 billion yuan ( 15.26 billion) over the next three years, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement released on its website Monday. By 2018, China shall build platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation and make breakthroughs on basic core technology, said the three-year implementation program for "Internet Plus" artificial intelligence. The plan is formulated jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Cyberspace Administration of China. According to the website, the country shall be in line with global AI technology and industries by 2018. At key regions, the country will cultivate some global leading AI enterprises and set up an innovative, open, cooperative, green and safe AI industrial ecology.

Popular tech blogger and software developer Marco Arment over the weekend argued that Apple's apparent failure to invest heavily in artificial intelligence wouldn't potentially render the tech giant irrelevant in the future. AI is currently fueling much-hyped personal assistants from rivals and Arment fears Apple's inaction may make the company the next BlackBerry (BBRY), which notoriously got crushed by Apple's iPhone. But Apple's success elsewhere should be able to keep it in the game, and moreover, the company might not necessarily need to develop its own AI software and services to remain competitive, some analysts say. Arment's criticism comes as Amazon (AMZN) enjoys unexpected success with its Echo digital personal assistant devices and days after Alphabet's Google (GOOGL) said it would introduce its own Echo-like devices later this year. The Amazon devices are based on its Alexa artificial intelligence assistant, while Google will incorporate its similar Google Now assistant into its devices.

The race is on for artificial intelligence in cybersecurity, empowering computer solutions with the ability to understand threats and respond immediately to them without (or with reduced) human intervention. Will it will survive the hype? A lot depends on how well the cybersecurity industry draws on the lessons we learned in trying to implement artificial intelligence in legal applications. IBM recently announced its foray into the cybersecurity–artificial intelligence arena using its flagship technology Watson. Watson has famously demonstrated its remarkable versatility already; so far it is has won the game show Jeopardy against two former champions and released its own cookbook (admittedly with mixed success from those who have tried the recipes). While it is a remarkable piece of technology, that doesn't necessarily equate to success in cybersecurity.