Google's job since inception has been to make everyone's lives easier, from everyday consumers to business people. At the NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference in San Francisco, Google's officials announced they're taking it a step further by offering limited access to a new machine-learning platform that everyone can use. The service they're offering is used by Google Photos, Translate, and Inbox to collect data and streamline processes in business. It's supposed to make it easier for developers to use the power of Big Data and machine learning to power other features offered by Google, including the ability to identify images inside apps, recognize commands spoken into Android Phones, and collect data to improve the user experience online. "Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply)," the company says in the official announcement.

Just yesterday, for example, Facebook Inc. (FB) rolled out a new feature, VoiceOver, that uses AI technology to give oral descriptions of FB photos for blind and visually-impaired users (iPad and iPhone users only, so far). Perhaps the big Stanley Kubrickian monolith moment for AI happened in March, with the resounding win by the Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) AI program AlphaGo,over a champion in the complex board game Go--a game previously thought to be far too complex for a computer to play better than a human. If true believers in AI are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, whichever company controls AI could steer the tech industry for years to come. Hence we are witnessing a high-stakes competition to develop the next platform to establish industry dominance in upcoming product cycles. While Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), FB, GOOGL and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are all jockeying furiously, the one company with the most riding on the outcome is International Business Machines Corp. (IBM).

Despite predictions of a tech slowdown, big-name businesses like Facebook, Apple, and IBM are pouring resources into artificial intelligence (AI), changing the field and gaining the interest of venture capitalists everywhere. As investors actively seek innovative players in the AI space, more entrepreneurs are gravitating toward the technology as they build and grow their own companies. Businesses such as Sentient, Context Relevant, and Scaled Inference all continue to work on their own multifunction AI platforms for computation and analysis, but this is only a small segment of the AI market. Multiple businesses now invest time and effort into purpose-built AI products. Here are a few of the businesses that are capturing attention in their respective industries for their AI work. With total capital of 58 million, AI specialist Kensho is already showing just how serious investors are about the technology.

Cameras are used routinely by police across the US to identify citizens, their faces cross-matched against databases of suspects and past criminals. Yet researchers claim there is too little scrutiny of how these tools work, and have found inherent racial bias in the system. So does a sophisticated, visual analysis tool reflect human prejudice and if so, who does that effect? "Studies indicate there's racial bias in the software," said Jonathan Frankle, staff technologist at Georgetown Law School. Working with law fellow Clare Garvie, Frankle has requested public information from more than 100 police departments across the country.

In a major win for artificial intelligence, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has beat European Go champion Fan Hui in the complex 2,500-year-old Chinese game of Go, touted the official Google blog. A victory in a Go game against a human champion has long been coveted among AI researchers, because the possible moves that a player can take can reach into the quadrillions and beyond. As a result, Go has proven a formidable challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Microsoft and Facebook, for example, have been working on ways to win in the game over a human champion, but have had no luck to date, according to a BBC news report. Last October, Google DeepMind held a private, closed-door Go match in its London office between its AlphaGo system and Hui.

Deep-learning machines are conquering realm after realm of human expertise, but is there a difference between Them and Us? I think the only thing that distinguishes us from the machines is memory. It is what makes us human, says Rajeev Srinivasan. In the wake of the astonishing feat by Google's AlphaGo machine in defeating, nay thrashing 4-1 the world's best player of Go, it is time for us to wonder what it is that is truly human, that which distinguishes us from the machines. Deep-learning machines are conquering realm after realm of human expertise, from chess to natural language to Go to other domains, and there is no reason to imagine their progress will come to a halt any time soon.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Messenger Platform at the F8 summit in San Francisco last year. This year he's expected to announce a "chat bot" store on Messenger. That is the question on many lips ahead of Facebook's annual software developer conference next week in San Francisco. Analysts expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open up Messenger's platform to "chatbots" and launch an online store for them. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Facebook will help software developers build "chatbots."

The Future of Machine Intelligence is a collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications. In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summarize a 20 minute video into four descriptive sentences. In fact, this summarization ability isn't limited to graphical content: Perhaps five years is pushing it, but the notion of a machine reading a book for comprehension is not too distant. In a similar vein, we should expect to see machines that answer questions by learning from the data, rather than following given rule sets.

It's a tantalizing thought: Log onto Facebook, order a pizza from a chat bot, ask another to look for vacation packages while you ask a third to make a restaurant reservation. Facebook's annual F8 developer's conference kicks off next week -- and analysts expect the social network could announce a plan for integrating chat bots onto the site. Chat bots are virtual agents able to mimic human conversation using artificial intelligence. "It's this notion of conversations as a service," Patrick Moorhead, an analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News. "The whole element of bots are we can use them exactly like we chat today -- over SMS [text messages] or Messenger. Imagine connecting with a company where it automatically is either a real human or uses AI to know exactly what you want."

A day after Microsoft launched its "AI teen girl Twitter chatbot," Twitter taught her to be racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking. "The makers of @TayandYou absolutely 10000 percent should have known better," thricedotted, a veteran Twitter botmaker and natural language processing researcher, told me via email. "It seems like the makers of @TayandYou attempted to account for a few specific mishaps, but sorely underestimated the vast potential for people to be assholes on the internet."