Tay was meant to be a friendly chatbot. It has been developed by Microsoft, aiming to sound like a typical teenage girl and interact with Twitter, GroupMe and Kik users through its learning AI system. The bot was revealed on Wednesday by Bill Gate's firm, starting with a pleasant tweet stating that "humans are super cool". However, it appears that Microsoft underestimated the dark side of Twitter users and it turns out that, as the chat went on, the AI learned from the users' hateful attitudes and began spouted racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and other loathing comments. In less than 24 hours, the friendly bot transformed into a real jerk.

Following a concerted effort to make a Twitter AI chatbot called Tay say incredibly racist and misogynist things, its creator, Microsoft, has taken it offline for an undetermined amount of time. In the space of just 24 hours, Tay turned from a genderless machine-learning AI designed to learn from Twitter, into a Donald Trump-supporting, holocaust-denying sexist. The Tay account was developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to learn from 18-24-year-olds – otherwise known as millenials – and, according to Microsoft, "the more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets". As Microsoft should have known, the masses of the internet tend not to play things by the book and, within the space of a few hours, the account with more than 100,000 followers was soon bombarded with vile comments in the hope that Tay would repeat them. No doubt sending Microsoft's PR team into a state of panic, Tay gradually started repeating many of these comments, including such obviously hateful ones as "Hitler did nothing wrong", which, according to The Guardian, was due to an effort led by members from the infamous 4chan forum.

Tay, Microsoft Corp's so-called chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage with millennials on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments by Twitter users that it parroted back to them. TayTweets (@TayandYou), which began tweeting on Wednesday, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it, according to its Twitter biography. But it was shut down by Microsoft early on Thursday after it made a series of inappropriate tweets. A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was "making adjustments" to the chatbot while the account is quiet. "Unfortunately, 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," the representative said in a written statement supplied to Reuters, without elaborating.

Microsoft released an AI chat bot that is currently "verified" on Twitter called @TayandYou that was meant to try to learn the way millennials speak and interact with them. It's meant to "test and improve Microsoft's understanding of conversational language" according to The Verge. Things did get pretty controversial. There are other types of people in addition to'millennials' who use Twitter who naturally found the bot, and some of them were able to "hack" into Tay's learning process. Here are some screen shots of tweets that were deleted once the Internet "taught" Tay some things: Tay's developers seemed to discover what was happening and began furiously deleting the racist tweets.

In an unassuming, two-story Victorian town house in Bristol, people are being filmed, monitored, and tracked 24/7. Invisible sensors constantly keep a watchful eye as they go about their business. But what these folks lose in privacy could be our collective gain in life expectancy--that is, if the long-term data bears out. Pivotal to the 15-million ( 21M) Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project, this house has been invisibly fitted with dozens of cameras and sensors while its occupants are asked to don wearable devices. The aim is to research how health is related to everyday lifestyle and living conditions over time.

Dr. Quoc Viet Le is a research scientist at Google Brain known for his path-breaking work on deep neural networks (DNN). He is especially famous for his Ph.D work in image processing under Andrew Ng, one of the pioneers of the DNN revolution. Le's and Ng's work demonstrated how computers could be used to learn complicated features and patterns in a way similar to how the mammalian brain learns, with better performance than earlier neural network technology. One of their first breakthroughs was demonstrating the training of a large neural network to detect cats from YouTube videos. This revolutionized the interest in DNNs, and got the current giants of the computer industry such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft in a race to incorporate AI techniques into their software.

It was the unspooling of an unfortunate series of events involving artificial intelligence, human nature, and a very public experiment. Amid this dangerous combination of forces, determining exactly what went wrong is near-impossible. But the bottom line is simple: Microsoft has awful lot of egg on its face after unleashing an online chat bot that Twitter users coaxed into regurgitating some seriously offensive language, including pointedly racist and sexist remarks. On Wednesday morning, the company unveiled Tay, a chat bot meant to mimic the verbal tics of a 19-year-old American girl, provided to the world at large via the messaging platforms Twitter, Kik and GroupMe. According to Microsoft, the aim was to "conduct research on conversational understanding."

Yahoo is today announcing the release of a large-scale data set that describes people's usage of news feeds on several of the company's web services, including Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. The idea is to empower machine learning researchers in academia with very rich data. The release of data is not, in and of itself, new for Yahoo -- there have been 56 previous releases in the Yahoo Labs Webscope program, which encompasses advertising, image, social, and ratings data, among other categories. This data set in particular covers 20 million people over the course of four months in 2015, and shows the types of devices people used to visit pages, how far down they got in the articles, and the top subjects of articles. There is data on people's locations, their ages (in some cases), and their gender -- all in an anonymized way. What's interesting about today's release is the size of the data set: 13.5TB.

The recent open sourcing of Google's TensorFlow was a significant event for machine learning. While the original release was lacking in some ways, development continues and improvements are already being made.

Human beings who design intelligent computers have a long history of getting those computers to beat other humans at games to prove how great their computers are. Think IBM's Deep Blue taking down chess legend Garry Kasparov, or the same company's Watson cleaning house on Jeopardy! But there is one game that artificial intelligence has long struggled to master: Go, a board game with roots in ancient China. Go players pick either black stones or white stones, with each player placing one stone of their color every turn. The idea is to capture and remove an opponent's stones by surrounding them with your own.