There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly," said Diane B. Greene, head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an AI boom. "Just teaching companies how to use AI will be a big business." This kind of change is what keeps Silicon Valley going. When personal computers displaced mainframe computers, it opened the door not just for Apple, but for companies making PC software for business, games and publishing. In the networking and Internet revolutions, venture capitalists invested in these new computing styles, and another generation of companies was born. Over the last decade, smartphones, social networks and cloud computing have moved from feeding the growth of companies like Facebook and Twitter, leapfrogging to Uber, Airbnb and others that have used the phones, personal rating systems and powerful remote computers in the cloud to create their own new businesses. Believe it or not, that stuff may be heading for the rearview mirror. The tech industry's new architecture is based not just on the giant public computing clouds of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, but also on their AI capabilities. These clouds create more efficient and supple use of computing resources, available for rent. Smaller clouds used in corporate systems were designed to connect to them. The AI resources Greene is opening up at Google are remarkable. Google's autocomplete feature that most of us use when doing a search can instantaneously touch 500 computers in several locations as it guesses what we are looking for. Services like Maps and Photos have more than 1 billion users, sorting places and faces by computer. Handling all that, plus tasks like language translation and speech recognition, Google has amassed a wealth of analysis technology that it can offer to customers. Urs Holzle, Greene's chief of technical infrastructure, predicts that the business of renting out machines and software will eventually surpass Google advertising. In 2015, ad profits were 16.4 billion. "In the '80s, it was spreadsheets," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, a noted computer design expert who was Google's first investor. "Now it's what you can do with machine learning." He added: "Better maps and photos is just the start.

As of February 1st, Nvidia has announced five finalists to compete for its 2016 Global Impact Award, a yearly 150,000 research grant that goes to any researcher or institution that has used Nvidia GPU technology to make a positive social or humanitarian impact. This year's finalist teams come from Stanford University, Imperial College London, George Mason University, Duke University and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology. Stanford finalist: "GPUs Help Map Worldwide Poverty" One of the five selected finalists this year is machine learning expert Stefano Ermon, who partnered with food security specialists David Lobell, Marshall Burke and some Stanford engineering students for their work in using GPU-accelerated deep learning to turn regular Google Earth images into statistical poverty models. The team trained a neural network to accurately predict poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa from satellite image features like roads, farmlands and homes. "There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which the most recent data we have is 20 years old, so we're still extrapolating from early '90s estimates," says Ermon.

Instead, it is doing just the opposite: the Windows maker announced the Bot Framework, a tool to assist developers in creating their own chat bots, at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. Microsoft has released its BotBuilder software development kit (SDK) on GitHub under an open source MIT licence. The kit will enable developers to add chat bots to different applications, including widely used communication apps like Slack. Microsoft's own developers are using the tool to integrate its virtual assistant Cortana with Skype, as well as launching a dedicated bot platform for the video calling service. Cortana will reportedly be able to actively search for relevant words and phrases and draw more detail from Bing, help users manage their calendar and make suggestions for people Skype users should get in touch with.

Kristina: AI is being used in call centers and other customer service areas. Can AI be used in situations outside these areas? Mikhai Naumov, Chief Strategy Officer, Digital Genius: Yes, some of the most exciting areas of AI implementations are around image recognition. This could be as simple as recognizing people on a photo, or as complex and controversial as self-driving cars. However - those implementations are quite different from using AI to improve brand-to-consumer communications.

Those with long memories will know Hotz from his days as Geohot, the hacker that cracked the iPhone and PlayStation 3. The engineer has founded a company, Comma, on the principle that cheap sensors and machine learning makes it possible to make a system for a few thousand bucks. It's a claim that Tesla was quick to trash, saying that while it's easy to build a system for a "known stretch of road," a real self-driving car is a much harder proposition. Still, if the folks at Horowitz are opening their bank accounts, even slightly, then they must feel differently.

Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, a Google-owned AI lab in London, is planning to buy a Tesla 3 from Elon Musk -- one of the company's earliest investors. Hassabis congratulated Musk on Twitter after Musk tweeted that 276,000 Model 3 orders had been made by the end of Saturday, just two days after the electric car was launched. "Really amazing to hear!! Just placing my order...," Hassabis wrote. At 35,000 ( 24,423), the five-seater Model 3 is the cheapest Tesla to date and is due to start shipping in late 2017. Those interested in owning a Tesla 3 need to put down 1,000 ( 702) deposits to reserve their vehicles.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic, fuelled by growing media interest and numerous investments made by big technology firms. AI is already being used in everyday life with applications including spam filters and speech recognition technologies, such as Siri and the Netflix recommendation engine. But in a business context how useful and practical is AI and is it something your business should consider? With the dawn of the information age, the effectiveness of customer engagement and services provided can damage an organisation or raise it from obscurity. The pivotal role that technology plays in this area cannot be understated.

" A revolution will happen when tools like Siri can truly serve as your personal assistant and you start relying on such an assistant throughout your day. To get there, these systems need more knowledge about your life and preferences, more knowledge about the world, better conversational interfaces and at least basic commonsense reasoning capabilities. I have interviewed Alon Halevy, Executive Director at Recruit Institute of Technology. What is the mission of the Recruit Institute of Technology? Alon Halevy: Before I describe the mission, I should introduce our parent company Recruit Holdings to those who may not be familiar with it.

GCP (Google Cloud Platform) Next 2016 conference was held in San Francisco, which gave some insights into the upcoming GCP roadmap, and acted as a reminder that Google needs to be taken seriously in the Public Cloud Provider space. The geographic expansion raised probably the most excitement: Google has committed to add two additional data centers this year to the current 3, following by yet another 10 new datacenters in 2017. This will be an impressive geographical coverage ramp up in two years, and will act as genuine competition against the other big providers. It looks like Google has a well cooked "recipe" for building cloud data centers, and in fact they have not kept this as a secret to themselves, but released it for public consumption with all the standard best practises, along with other papers such as its highly scalable network load balancer design. While the platform is geographically expanding, the focus is also on technology innovations and the Google team are releasing Machine Learning and Big Data offerings one after the other at a fast pace. Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) is playing a key role in all aspects of IT, including the operating data centers (according to Google).

Have you tried talking to anyone about Artificial Intelligence? Those words instantly conjure up images of killer robots, Jarvis and superhero movies for most people. Artificial Intelligence has gone through several decades of ups and downs. Investors and founders have gained and lost billions through these cycles, while tech leaders like Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and a long history of neuroscientists from Hubel and Weisel, to Sejnowski and Olshausen continued to push the boundaries on brain research, Neuromorphic Engineering, Robotics and Machine Learning, breaking new grounds, cycle after cycle. Much of the technology industry waited for a big bang event to announce the big arrival of AI.