The era of the one-size-fits-all supercomputer is over. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), the market leader in this space, is now producing high performance computing systems for specific needs. The shift is being driven, in part, by the increasing desire for systems that can process data efficiently. HPE on Monday announced a series of new systems targeted at specific processes such as "deep learning." This is a branch of machine learning used, in particular, to analyze images and sound.

Facebook is using an artificial intelligence system to automatically caption photos in an effort to increase the accessibility of its website and apps. The feature, called "automatic alternative text", uses image recognition technology developed through machine-learning to identify the objects pictured. It's not perfect yet, with sample captions from Facebook, shared by The Verge, reading more like a laundry list than a descriptive overview: "Image may contain: two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, outdoor, water" reads the caption on one picture of a couple taking a photograph on a beach, while "image may contain: pizza, food" is the caption for a picture of a tasty-looking pepperoni and olive pizza. Related: AI is already making inroads into journalism but could it win a Pulitzer? But the technology, which is launching first on iOS, will do a great deal towards making the Facebook app more usable for blind and visually impaired visitors.

With machine learning taking off among hyperscalers and others who have massive amounts of data to chew on to better serve their customers and traditional simulation and modeling applications scaling better across multiple GPUs, all server makers are in an arm's race to see how many GPUs they can cram into their servers to make bigger chunks of compute available to applications. As the GPU Technical Conference hosted by Nvidia is kicking off in San Jose, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is the dominant peddler of servers in the world with Dell nipping at its heels and a slew of others who aspire to be number three, rolled out a new dense hybrid system that can pack twice as many GPU accelerators in a chassis as its predecessor as well as some companion Lustre appliances that will also be able to run object storage from a number of vendors as well. The Apollo 6500 hybrid servers are the follow-ons to the ProLiant SL6000 "scalable systems" product line that originally debuted back in June 2009 to compete against Dell's custom machines that are sold by its Data Center Solutions (DCS) division. The SL6500s, which were dense machines designed explicitly to have lots of GPU accelerators hanging off Xeon CPUs, rolled out shortly after that and were updated last in November 2012. With the SL270s Gen8 node that HPE offered at the time, its densest compute element, a 4U SL6500 enclosure could have two half-width server sleds, each with two Xeon E5 processors and up to eight single-wide Tesla M2070Q, M2075, M2090, or K10 GPU coprocessor cards rated at no more than 225 watts each.

Current Machine Learning and AI systems are becoming impressive and useful. Lately, as the Head of Industrial Internet for Tieto, I have seen several promising examples of systems that automatically decipher and predict faults in complex industrial systems and machinery. These systems understand language, simulate conditions, strategize and even forecast the future. This is the frontline of how industries are digitalizing and transforming. Companies that don't embrace this new source of created value are at a serious risk of falling behind.

Five expert panelists weigh in on the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence in medicine and the issues surrounding, privacy, accuracy, and accountability.

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google's AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared...

Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will automatically describe the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called automatic alternative text, the feature uses artificial intelligence to identify visual content and provide a description for people using screen readers. While scrolling through Facebook, blind and visually impaired users will hear the name of the person followed by the word "photo" when they scroll past an image post by a user. Automatic alt text will then describe a list of themes of the image, such as "three people, smiling, outdoors" or "two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, tree, outdoor". According to Facebook, more than two million photos are shared on social media every day, yet as content becomes more visual, many blind and visually impaired users are left feeling excluded.

Microsoft created an artificial intelligence that would learn to be more human by talking to people on Twitter. This went about as well as you'd expect. In other news, Dominos Pizza invents something pointless, and the people of Oregon invent a new way to piss off sea lions.

Artificial Intelligence has been the topic de jour lately with every corner of intellectual thought sounding in on the perils, and the potential rewards, of synthesizing a machine intelligence that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. Elon Musk, Bill Gates and even Stephen Hawking have all suggested that an AI with this sort of general intelligence (also known as Strong AI or Full AI) could bring about an apocalypse that sees an end to human civilization, or even an end to the human race. There's no doubt that Strong AI is the subject of intense research by DARPA, MIT, Berkeley, IBM, Google and many others. But it's hard not to notice that despite all the anxiety, Strong AI today lives only in the imagination of science fiction writers and in the hopes and dreams of research scientist. At the prestigious "Future of AI" conference in San Juan this January, the estimates for when an AI might emerge vacillated wildly from 5 years to a hundred years in our future -- its variables are that unknown.

South Korea's top automaker Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia Motors on Tuesday announced a plan to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-based, Internet-connected car to create a new future lifestyle with a "driving, high-performing computer". The driving computer means a car will become a high-performing computer itself as the car, to be developed by Hyundai and Kia, will self-drive based on AI and connect to electronic devices while driving based on internet connectivity, Xinhua cited a joint statement as saying. The main concept of the project is a "hyper-connected and intelligent car", which means an interaction between cars home as well as home and office in addition to AI-based self-driving. To achieve the goal, the automakers will focus on four major themes, intelligent remote-controlling support service, perfect self-driving, smart traffic and mobility hub. The remote-controlling support service aims to check and examine cars on a real-time basis to detect potential emergency situations in advance.