Meet Tay, Microsoft's short-lived chatbot that was supposed to seem like your average millennial woman but was quickly corrupted by Internet trolling. "Unfortunately," a Microsoft spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in an email, "within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana can't hold much conversation, but they do carry out tasks like making phone calls and conducting a Google search. In China, Microsoft has a chatbot named Xiaoice that has been lauded for its ability to hold realistic conversations with humans.

The world of computing has followed Moore's Law for generations. The "law," which was developed by researcher Gordon Moore in the 1970s, says that the number of transistors that can be squeezed into a set amount of space will double every two years. It's been a reliable gauge ever since. Moore's Law may be nearing its end, however. Tom Simonite at the MIT Technology Review writes that Intel has declared in a regulatory filing what insiders have suspected: The company is slowing the release of new chips in a manner that doesn't keep pace with the law.

Economic inequality has become a prominent issue in this year's U.S. presidential election. Candidates in both parties argue that the wealthy have bent the political system to their own economic benefit. And while the rich have grown richer, wages for the median worker have been stagnant. By many measures, the gap between high earners and low earners has widened substantially. But is this all the result of nefarious influence-peddling by the 1%?

The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. The size reflects the frequency of word use – looks like guys called Andrew are Amy's biggest users – with blue representing nouns, purple for verbs, orange for proper nouns, green for adjectives, red for conjunctions and yellow for adverbs. If you look closely, you'll notice that the kinds of busy people who are beta users of Amy are also likely to talk about founders, coffee and Skype.

The folks over at x.ai – creators of Amy, the artificial intelligence answer to scheduling meetings – have had a shot at showing exactly what it looks like inside their bot's brain, using AI, of course. The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. Without a human ever telling the RNN the definitions of different word groups, it has managed to understand that Stanford is different from Instagram, and that Jesse, Luke and Jason are names. This data was cut to down to the 3,500 most frequently used words and has then been projected into a 2D shape in order to show the relationships the AI has made between different words.

Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay was only a few hours old, and humans had already corrupted it into a machine that cheerfully spewed racist, sexist and otherwise hateful comments. Tay was developed by the technology and research and Bing teams at Microsoft Corp. to conduct research on "conversational understanding." The bot talks like a teenager (it says it has "zero chill") and is designed to chat with people ages 18 to 24 in the U.S. on social platforms such as Twitter, GroupMe and Kik, according to its website. "The more Humans share with me the more I learn," Tay tweeted several times Wednesday -- its only day of Twitter life. But Tay might have learned too much.

Let's face it: if you grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, you probably see virtual reality as just a stepping stone toward the Holy Grail of simulation, the Holodeck. It's no surprise, then, that Reddit users illogical_cpt and Bradllez have found a way to bring the Holodeck to VR. Thanks in part to work from Psyrek, they built a Holodeck grid for Steam VR that serves as an extremely appropriate background while you're between games. It's not going to be as vast or immersive as the "real" thing, and you'll need a compatible headset (like the HTC Vive) to even give this a try. Still, it's a pleasant reminder that science fiction and reality are much closer than they used to be.

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft is "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets" generated by its renegade artificial intelligence chatbot, Tay, which was abruptly taken offline Thursday after one day of life. The company said it will bring Tay back after engineers can plan better for hackers with "malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," according to a blog post Friday by Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Research. Tay launched Wednesday with little fanfare. The experiment was aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds communicating via text, Twitter and Kik, and its AI mission was largely to engage social users in conversation. Tay was modeled on a successful chatbot launch in China, Xiaolche, that has been embraced apparently without incident by 40 million users, the post notes.

Microsoft's A.I. chatbot started out as an innocent, interesting experiment. Then the rest of the Internet showed up. Twitter users convinced Tay, the name of the chatbot, which was available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, so Microsoft is giving it a break. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon," a statement reads on the website for Tay.

A Microsoft executive said Friday that the company was "deeply sorry" for the "unintended offensive and hurtful" tweets the company's Tay chatbot delivered earlier this week. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," Peter Lee, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft Research, wrote in a blog post. While that echoes the message that Microsoft delivered earlier, Lee attempted to show how Tay wasn't simply unleashed onto the Internet without preparation. Tay was the outgrowth of a similar Microsoft chatbot known as XiaoIce, which is already "delighting" 40 million people in China, Lee explained. "The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment?" Lee wrote.