Google has entered into the machine learning market with the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning. Built on top of the company's open source machine learning system TensorFlow, the offering will allow customers to build custom algorithms the make predictions for their business, aiding decision making. "At Google, researchers collaborate closely with product teams, applying the latest advances in machine learning to existing products and services – such as speech recognition in the Google app, search in Google Photos and the Smart Reply feature in Inbox by Gmail," said Slaven Bilac, Software Engineer at Google Research. "At GCP NEXT 2016, we announced the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning, a framework for building and training custom models to be used in intelligent applications." The system is already used in a number of Google's current offerings, though it is later to market than its competitors.

Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down. The company made the Twitter account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence prowess. But it quickly started sending out offensive tweets. "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now," it wrote in one tweet. "donald trump is the only hope we've got."

Google today announced at its GCP NEXT conference in San Francisco a new service called Cloud Machine Learning in a limited preview. The tool relies on the TensorFlow machine learning library that Google open-sourced a few months ago. And it powers another new product called the Google Cloud Speech API, as well as the Google Cloud Translate API. Google's launch of the service follows the launch of the Cloud Vision API recently. But a machine learning platform is something that public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services beat Google to.

Microsoft Corp. is in damage control mode after Twitter users exploited its new artificial intelligence chat bot, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks. The company introduced Tay earlier this week to chat with real humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. The Internet took advantage and quickly tried to see how far it could push Tay.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

The automation of work and the digital disruption of business models place a premium on leaders who can create a vision of change and frame it positively. How disruptive will accelerating workplace automation be for organizations in the future? For decades, businesses have deployed technology to reduce costs and complexity, make better products, and develop new business models. But the new potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics poses major new challenges for leaders as they seek to reset their strategies for a digital age. Last November, Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer and Nadir Mohamed, the recently retired CEO of Rogers Communications, sat down with Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor at INSEAD, and Harvard professor Robert Kegan to debate some of the issues with Claudio Feser, head of McKinsey's leadership development initiative.

Yesterday, Microsoft unleashed Tay, the teen-talking AI chatbot built to mimic and converse with users in real time. Because the world is a terrible place full of shitty people, many of those users took advantage of Tay's machine learning capabilities and coaxed it into say racist, sexist, and generally awful things. While things started off innocently enough, Godwin's Law--an internet rule dictating that an online discussion will inevitably devolve into fights over Adolf Hitler and the Nazis if left for long enough--eventually took hold. Tay quickly began to spout off racist and xenophobic epithets, largely in response to the people who were tweeting at it--the chatbot, after all, takes its conversational cues from the world wide web. Given that the internet is often a massive garbage fire of the worst parts of humanity, it should come as no surprise that Tay began to take on those characteristics.

This is basically an implementation of this "Image Analogies" paper, In our case, we use feature maps from VGG16. The patch matching and blending is inspired by the method described in "Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis". Effects similar to that paper can be achieved by turning off the analogy loss (or leave it on!) Also, instead of using brute-force patch matching we use the PatchMatch algorithm to approximate the best patch matches. The initial code was adapted from the Keras "neural style transfer" example.

Having spent the past 31 years memorizing an astonishing collection of general knowledge, the artificial-intelligence engine created by Doug Lenat is finally ready to go to work. Lenat's creation is Cyc, a knowledge base of semantic information designed to give computers some understanding of how things work in the real world. Cyc has been given many thousands of facts, including lots of information that you wouldn't find in an encyclopedia because it seems self-evident. It knows, for example, that that Sir Isaac Newton is a famous historical figure who is no longer alive. But more important, Cyc also understands that if you let go of an apple it will fall to the ground; that an apple is not bigger than a person; and that a person cannot throw an apple into space.

You can thank Microsoft for a new sarcastic millennial who can't stop cracking jokes on Twitter. Microsoft's research arm and Bing search engine business unit released on Wednesday a chat bot named Tay, which is powered by artificial intelligence technologies. Tay was designed to mimic the linguistic mannerisms of 18- to 24-year-olds on social media platforms. She (as specified by Microsoft) can be found on Twitter, GroupMe and Kik -- all social platforms where users can converse with her, prompting Tay to attempt to communicate like an actual human being. The Windows maker didn't detail specific types of AI technologies used to produce Tay -- only to reveal that she was "built by mining relevant public data and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff including improvisational comedians," according to a Microsoft blog post.