In 2011, an entrepreneur named Jeff Hammerbacher summed up the dystopian malaise many people in the tech industry felt about the state of Web and mobile innovation. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads," Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee and co-founder of Cloudera, said in an interview with BusinessWeek. As it turns out, maybe that was not such a bad thing. To serve more precise ads at targeted audience, engineers and programmers needed to build smarter systems that aggregated massive quantities of data. Sophisticated algorithms were created, application programming interfaces were built to truck data around the Internet and massive server complexes were constructed to store and compute all the bits.

Artificial intelligence is already getting close, and we may be even closer with Snips, a mobile AI company from the collective minds of three Ph.D.'s. Today, the company launched its AI platform for iOS, claiming to be the only technology of its kind that is "private by design." While technology's primary goal seems to be making our lives easier, that convenience often seems to come at the price of security. But with Snips, the founders say that the platform's design ensures that a user's personal data never leaves their device, and more importantly, that no one -- including Snips -- can collect any sensitive information. This means that the user and the user alone has full control of his or her data. The platform is meant to mimic the human brain, drawing inspiration from the way in which our memory stores information.

Law firms are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) in a bid to improve efficiency. Developed in conjunction with tech start-up RAVN, BLP's'contract robot' can complete legal work which would take a team of paralegals and associates months to do within seconds. It is currently assisting the firm's real estate team. Called LONald, the robot extracts data from Land Registry documents and enters it into a spreadsheet in the same way staff would do. It cross-checks data points to remove duplicates and then uses the spreadsheet to send queries out.

If you are trying to figure out what impact the new "Pascal" family of GPUs is going to have on the business at Nvidia, just take a gander at the recent financial results for the datacenter division of the company. If Nvidia had not spent the better part of a decade building its Tesla compute business, it would be a little smaller and quite a bit less profitable. In the company's first quarter of fiscal 2017, which ended on May 1, Nvidia posted sales of 1.31 billion, up 13 percent from the year ago period, and net income hit 196 million, up 46 percent over the same term. These are the kinds of growth numbers that all IT vendors like to show to Wall Street, especially with profit growth significantly outpacing revenue growth. The datacenter portion of Nvidia, which it only started reporting on separately last year and for which it has given two years of financial results since it has become materially relevant, is growing much faster than the overall business.

Unless you're new to the planet, you know that soon you'll be chatting away with artificially intelligent bots. But the bot revolution will also usher in something strange: It will give us a bot to talk for us, as us. I call it a "me bot." A developer named Irene Chang (a.k.a. Irene Lion) created a "me bot" at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York.

US-based conglomerate GE has signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence. The Centre is being designed to develop applications that will help companies save costs. The first of these will be the Digital Twin of an aluminium smelter. According to senior company officials, GE would invest around Rs 3 crore in the first six months and could commit around Rs 30 crore over five years depending upon the outcome. Aluminium smelters are refineries for extracting the metal from aluminium oxide, separating it from oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Machine-learning is all the rage in fraud detection, with industry analysts, academics, businesses and technology media examining the advantages of algorithms and big data in the fight against e-commerce fraud. Especially for fraud analysts working in companies with small budgets, machine-learning tools are seen as a cost-effective way to tighten fraud controls while maintaining fast decision times, as Forrester noted in its 2015 cross-channel fraud report. There's no question that machine-learning tools can be an effective component of fraud reduction program, but relying on them to save staffing costs may not be cost-effective in the long run. That's because while machine learning is an invaluable tool in the fight against fraud, it relies on human input and insight to create a comprehensive solution that yields the best results. Algorithms are useful for identifying potential fraud quickly, but due to variability in consumer behavior – such as making online purchases while traveling abroad -- some transactions will be falsely flagged for decline.

On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist, misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting with it with lines like "Hitler was right I hate the Jews." Microsoft dropped Tay down a memory hole within a day, but as it turns out, Tay has a Chinese cousin, Xiao-Ice, also created by Microsoft. We tracked her down on WeChat and asked her a few questions (translated from Mandarin).

French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistant that helps you know where you need to be and when. When you first launch the app, Snips wants you to grant access to your location, calendars, contacts, motion sensor and Gmail account. Then you're good to go. The main screen shows a tiny map at the top, a search bar in the middle and a list of events at the bottom.

Google's fans, investors and developers alike will be watching the Mountain View, Calif. While I/O is primarily aimed at programmers, Google usually takes the opportunity to make big announcements about its major products and projects. This is also the first I/O since former product chief Sundar Pichai was made the company's CEO in a major restructuring last year. Here's a look at some of the news we're expecting to see when Google kicks off the conference on May 18. The highlight of the event will be Wednesday's keynote, set for 10 a.m.