Google is making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the machine learning revolution with a new product for building models that predict the future. At the company's GCP Next conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Google announced the private beta of a new Cloud Machine Learning service that lets businesses create a custom machine learning model. To do so, users work with data they have in Google's other cloud services. Cloud Machine Learning handles data ingestion and training and then uses the resulting machine-learning model to make predictions. It's designed for companies that want to use machine learning to make predictions for their business.

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay -- a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation." Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay -- being essentially a robot parrot with an Internet connection -- started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

A chatbot developed by Microsoft has gone rogue on Twitter, swearing and making racist remarks and inflammatory political statements. The experimental AI, which learns from conversations, was designed to interact with 18-24-year-olds. Just 24 hours after artificial intelligence Tay was unleashed, Microsoft appeared to be editing some of its more inflammatory comments. The software firm said it was "making some adjustments". "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments to Tay," the firm said in a statement.

Sean Gallup / GettySome people are really touched by artificial intelligence. I spend a lot of time covering advances in artificial intelligence. It's one of the big stories of our time -- so much so that the White House has said it will remake our society. On Wednesday, I attended an Intelligence Squared debate at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y that made me see artificial intelligence in a whole new way. Keen, the author of "The Internet Is Not the Answer," and Lanier, author of "Who Owns the Future," teased apart what we're really talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence.

When the computer AlphaGo (0) defeated Lee Sedol -- who is perhaps the world's top Go player -- by a match score of 4-1 last week, Google's DeepMind division showed that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to deliver on some of its promises. Go is an Asian board game far more complex than chess, and it has been viewed as the last great game challenge for AI. When DeepMind set out to conquer Go, some people thought the project would take 10 years. In fact, it only took the team about one year. Unlike chess, in which most of the great games and moves in history can be programmed into a database and searched during the match, Go has too many combinations to work that way.

From the World Economic Forum – Davos 2016, we have the probing panel discussion below that examines the state of AI in 2016. How close are technologies to simulating or overtaking human intelligence and what are the implications for industry and society?

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews." Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic.

The company made a slew of announcements at the conference Wednesday. Diane Greene, Google's head of cloud computing, argued that Google's cloud platform can offer more flexible tools and options than its primary competitors, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Through advanced tools and machine learning capabilities, Google is trying to attract the attention of developers who might not normally have access to such powerful technology. As Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. said during the keynote, machine learning is "what's next," TechCrunch reported. This is not the first time that Schmidt has boasted of the potential for artificial intelligence.

"Sophia," an advanced, lifelike robot told its creator that it will "destroy humans" at the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology show. The robot which was created by Hanson Robotics, a firm that was founded and is run by David Hanson, made the shocking revelation on the show. In a question and answer session with the robot, Hanson asks the robot, "Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no." Sophia as he is named by his creator, however, makes her intentions clear and unblinkingly answers, "OK. Sophia is made solely of patented silicon.

The tech company introduced "Tay" this week -- a bot that responds to users' queries and emulates the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. The aim was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets -- though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself.