Amazon is making a bigger leap into open-source technology with the unveiling of its machine-learning software DSSTNE. The newly released program is competing with Google's TensorFlow, which the search giant open-sourced last year. Amazon says DSSTNE (which stands for Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine and is pronounced "Destiny") excels in situations where there isn't a lot of data to train the machine-learning system, whereas TensorFlow is geared for handling tons of data. DSSTNE is also faster than TensorFlow, with Amazon claiming up to 2.1 times the speed in low-data situations. The software comes from Amazon's need to make recommendations in its retail platform, which required the company to develop neural network programs.

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment. The experiment, developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the Universe to run through all the combinations and work this out." Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

Another Sunday, another easy afternoon with your omniscient Go computer. This being your 223rd match together, your record is 0-222. Despite your dismal losing streak, you are comforted by the presence of this mysteriously powerful, utterly opaque technological marvel. It is best that complicated things like Go are left to the professionals – or their God-like artificial replacements. In freeing yourself of the need to make decisions, you have transcended to a new level of awareness.

The subtle relationship between machines and language has evolved over a reasonably long period but is now accelerating. Soon after the first computers were built, various abstract languages were formulated in order to link these machines' inner mechanisms to processes coded by humans. The man-machine relationship has evolved dramatically since then, especially through the languages used both to instruct the machine and to relate to it. These languages now have a double role: meta-knowledge (language used for the functional description of processes) and content (language processed in various forms but in the end reduced to readable text). The digitalization of everything, by both institutions and private companies, is progressively producing impressive "corpuses" which, in their ethereal digital nature, can be goldmines for neural network software.

Businesses around the globe are bracing for the next wave of digital transformation. Many have begun to embrace it, but it is still early days. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the way we work and live, but the biggest impacts from it are yet to come. Accenture already has invested in advanced AI across our business, to help our clients improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities. But our new partnership with IPSoft is meant to truly advance that agenda.

Move over, Siri and Tay, and make room for a new female virtual agent set to invade the enterprise: Amelia. Things are happening fast in the new world of artificial intelligence (AI) development, and a new industry partnership just announced today aims to help enterprises adopt the complicated and potentially game-changing technology with Amelia. Accenture, a professional services consultancy, is teaming up with IPsoft, an autonomic and cognitive computing specialist that invented Amelia, "to accelerate client adoption of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities for their businesses." The importance of AI in the enterprise -- along with ancillary technologies like machine learning (ML) and cognitive computing -- was highlighted recently by no less than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in keynote addresses at their respective developer conferences. Their companies are helping to spearhead AI programming, with early efforts centered around bots, or chatbots, or virtual agents.

A team of Australian physicists has employed a new research assistant in the form of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to help set up experiments in quantum mechanics. For its first task, the algorithm took control of a delicate experiment to create a Bose-Einstein condensate – a weird state of matter that can form in certain atoms at ultracold temperatures. The algorithm didn't need specific training and was able to learn on the job. It developed its own model of the process and tweaking the parameters to get them just right. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in - and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans. Even the experts themselves don't always fully understand how an AI system operates. Hey, iPhone users, are you tired of Siri not being able to do much besides pull up search results? No need to despair: The team behind Siri has recently built Viv, a virtual assistance with actual artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in - and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans. Even the experts themselves don't always fully understand how an AI system operates. Hey, iPhone users, are you tired of Siri not being able to do much besides pull up search results? No need to despair: The team behind Siri has recently built Viv, a virtual assistance with actual artificial intelligence.