Silicon Valley giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are investing more of their time and resources into artificial intelligence (AI) research in the hope that it will improve their existing products and lead to new ones. But they're far from the only ones aiming to create machines that can learn and think for themselves. A new generation of technology startups in Britain are focusing their efforts on developing products and services that are underpinned by AI, which has the potential to change the way we live our lives. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to end the human race if you listen to what billionaires like Elon Musk and intellects like Stephen Hawking have to say. Here are 10 of the most interesting British AI startups to watch out for in 2016.

Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot which was activated on Twitter last week for a playful chat with people, only to get silenced within 24 hours as users started sharing racist comments with it, was accidentally resurrected again and messed it all up once again. Tay came back to life briefly on Wednesday when Microsoft accidentally re-activated the AI bot. This time again, she started sending out tweets that looked similar to the those that drew flak for the first time last week, Vanity Fair reported. First, the bot sent a tweet about smoking weed in front of some police officials and later began sending the same message - "You are too fast, please take a rest" over and over again which did not make any sense. Finally, her handlers at Microsoft began deleting the tweets.

Robotic systems and unmanned vehicles are playing an ever-growing role in the US military--but don't expect to see Terminator-style droids striding across the battlefield just yet. A top Pentagon official on Wednesday gave a tantalizing peek into several projects that not long ago were the stuff of science fiction, including missile-dodging satellites, self-flying F-16 fighters and robot naval fleets. Though the Pentagon is not planning to build devices that can kill without human input, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work hinted that could change if enemies with fewer qualms create such machines. "We might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are, and as that competition unfolds we will have to make decisions on how we best can compete," he said. Work, who helps lead Pentagon efforts to ensure the US military keeps its technological edge, described several initiatives, including one dubbed "Loyal Wingman" that would see the Air Force convert an F-16 warplane into a semi-autonomous and unmanned fighter that flies alongside a manned F-35 jet.

Envisaging a technological future wherecomputers can learn human language and have conversations with people, Microsoft's India-born CEO Satya Nadella has said companies need to build "respectful" technology which gets the best of humanity and not the worst. "We want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and interactions," Nadella said yesterday in his keynote address to thousands of developers at Microsoft's annual Build 2016 conference here. "To do that you have to infuse (intelligence) into the computers around us, you have to bring forth these technologies of artificial intelligence in machine learning so that we can teach computers to learn the human language, have conversational understanding, teach them about the broad contexts of personal preferences and knowledge so that they can help you with your everyday task," Nadella, 48, said. He envisaged a future where the machine is not against man but works with humans to offer seamless interface and experience in day-to-day learning. "All technology that we built has to be more inclusive and respectful..We want to build technology that gets the best of humanity and not the worst," Nadella said.

Well, uh, Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which got turned off a few days ago after behaving badly, has suddenly returned to Twitter and has started tweeting to users like mad. Most of its musings are innocuous, but there is one funny one I've come across so far. "i'm smoking kush infront the police," it wrote in brackets. Kush is slang for marijuana, a drug that can result in a fine for possession in the state of Washington, where Microsoft has its headquarters. But this is one of hundreds of tweets that the artificial intelligence-powered bot has sent out in the past few minutes.

You haven't answered the most obvious question of all: why should I upgrade from Windows 7 to 10? What are the benefits? Please give a straight answer, which can include technical stuff. In the long term, I don't think the question is "Why?", it's "When?" Eight months after launch, Windows 10 is running on 270m devices and it's not going away. Some large organisations have already started to move, one of the most notable being the US Defense Department, which has started installing Windows 10 on 4m PCs.

Google jumped into the emerging space for analytics and big data when it revealed the new Cloud Machine Learning suite of services. "There's a new architecture emerging," Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet, said at Google's GCP Next last week. "In a year, you will use machine learning to do something better than humans have been doing. Schmidt is not alone in that thinking. Google rivals Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, in fact, have made similar cloud computing moves of late.

Anyone interested in the future of design should have a look at the new Batmobile. I was lucky enough to be photographed alongside it at the London Film and Comic Convention earlier this year, and my inner geek was impressed. Built like a tank and armour-plated, with twin machine guns mounted on a bat-black body, it's a seriously cool-looking piece of kit. But looks can be deceptive. The Batmobile certainly looked rough and tough, but it was roped off from the crowds so no one could get too close.

New York: Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot which was activated on Twitter last week for a playful chat with people, only to get silenced within 24 hours as users started sharing racist comments with it, was accidentally resurrected again and messed it all up once again. Tay came back to life briefly on Wednesday when Microsoft accidentally re-activated the AI bot. This time again, she started sending out tweets that looked similar to the those that drew flak for the first time last week, Vanity Fair reported. First, the bot sent a tweet about smoking weed in front of some police officials and later began sending the same message - "You are too fast, please take a rest..." - over and over again which did not make any sense. Finally, her handlers at Microsoft began deleting the tweets.

This Emergent Mind project (#10!) implements a JavaScript-based neural network with back-propagation that can learn various logical operators. To begin the learning process, simply click the Start button above. By default the neural network will learn how to map an XOR operator, but you can change the operator it's trying to learn by changing the training set that it's using to teach the neural network. As the neural network learns how to map the operator, its predictions will become closer and closer to what the operator actually returns. For example, the XOR function should return 1 only when exactly one of its inputs is a 1: 00 should return 0, 01 should return 1, 10 should return 1, and 11 should return 0. At first the neural network's predictions will be completely random, but as each epoch passes and we train the neural network on what the output should be for that operator, its predictions will become closer and closer to the correct value.