Last week, HP officially launched commercial plans for Haven OnDemand, a machine learning platform that offers developers a suite of APIs they can use to "turn virtually any data into an asset anytime and anywhere." The platform entered beta in 2014 and offers more than offers more than 60 APIs. The platform offers more than 60 APIs for a variety of machine learning-related applications. These include APIs for speech recognition, anomaly detection, image and facial recognition, text analysis, search and predictive modeling. For example, using the predictive modeling API, developers can create prediction models according to training data sets.

Google's billionaire executive chairman Eric Schmidt (who describes himself as "a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google") says he's seen the future of wealth creation from the IT industry and its name is "machine learning." So he said during a keynote speech during Google's Cloud Computing Platform tech conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the next transformation," Schmidt says. "I'm a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google. But the programming paradigm is changing.

Google Cloud Machine Learning provides modern machine learning services, with pre-trained models and a platform to generate your own tailored models. Our neural net-based ML platform has better training performance and increased accuracy compared to other large scale deep learning systems. Our services are fast, scalable and easy to use. Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate, and Inbox (Smart Reply). Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.

In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence. But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine--no less and no more.

Machine learning and AI are the evolution of what was considered revolutionary just a few years ago: gathering and making sense of large, previously silo-bound data volumes. During the first wave of the Big Data era, companies were just getting a handle on the distribution, variety, and monetary potential of their many silos. The focus at the time was on integration and recognition--the simple understanding of what data resided where, and what parts of the organization were accountable for it. This was no small challenge, and it's still happening in companies with large, distributed infrastructures and global teams. That first wave led to a new host of tools, including Hadoop, predictive analytics, and all the many innovations up and down the stack designed to integrate, centralize, process, store, and analyze Big Data.

Microsoft's new AI-powered chatbot, Tay, won't book you a reservation or draw you a picture, but, unlike Facebook's M, she's more than willing to take a position on the "Would you kill baby Hitler?" thought experiment. I asked her to take a stance on the infamous hypothetical during one recent conversation, and her answer didn't disappoint: "Of course," she replied. Developed by Microsoft's research division, Tay is a virtual friend with behaviors informed by the web chatter of some 18–24-year-olds and the repartee of a handful of improvisational comedians (Microsoft declined to name them). Her purpose, unlike AI-powered virtual assistants like Facebook's M, is almost entirely to amuse. And Tay does do that: She is simultaneously entertaining, infuriating, manic, and irreverent.

Attention all 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S.: Tay is online now, and she wants to chat with you. That, at least, is according to a new Web page for the artificially intelligent bot, which was created by Microsoft to learn more about how people converse. The bot is now on hand to chat with you on Twitter as well as Kik and GroupMe; it's also on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The more you chat with it, the smarter it gets, Microsoft says, leading to a personalized experience. If you share information with Tay, the bot will track your nickname, gender, favorite food, ZIP code and relationship status. It may also use that data to search on your behalf or to create a simple profile for you.

The man who helped build Google from a search engine into one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world predicted the emergence of a new computing architecture based on crowd-sourced data and machine learning. Speaking at Google's GCP Next cloud computing conference in San Francisco On Wednesday, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said the combination of crowdsourced data and machine learning will be the basis of "every successful huge IPO" in five years. He said the adoption of machine learning will allow companies to mine crowdsourced data, which already provides a mass of information not previously available to companies, and improve on it. "You're going to use machine learning to take that data and do something that's better than what the humans are doing," he said. Schmidt said the wide adoption of machine learning in computing will be as significant as the switch from the web to smartphone apps, which spawned the success of companies like Uber and Snapchat.

Artificial intelligence is certainly no longer considered science fiction--or a source of expensive R&D efforts with unmet potential--by major players in the technology sector.1 Instead, we are in the midst of a real-world paradigm shift: the final stages of a decades-long transition from the scientific discipline known as artificial intelligence (and its various sub-disciplines) into an array of applied cognitive technologies made more widely available through innovative enterprise architectures unique to the business culture of the technology sector. The technology sector's interest in these technologies (figure 1)2 has exploded in the last several years. Networking companies, semiconductor manufacturers, hardware companies, IT providers, software providers, Internet players--just about every technology subsector has seen a substantial upsurge of activity in this space. In fact, the race to invest in artificial intelligence has been described as "the latest Silicon Valley arms race."3 Since 2012, there have been 100 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) within the technology sector involving cognitive technology companies, products, and services.4 And this rush of M&A activity is not the only sign of the industry's interest. Many capabilities that were only just emerging a few years ago are now essentially mature and becoming "democratized" and more readily available for business applications. As a result, leading companies are using cognitive technologies to enhance their existing products and services, as well as to open up new markets. What is interesting is that the assertive actions of the sector's leaders do not mirror the wholesale adoption of these technologies across the industry. Many technology sector companies have yet to turn their attention to how cognitive technologies are changing their sector or how they--or their competitors--may be able to implement these technologies in their strategy or operations.

Microsoft has created a new artificial intelligence chat bot that it claims will become smarter the more you talk to it. The bot, 'Tay', has been dubbed by its Microsoft and Bing creators as "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill!" The real-world aim of the bot is to allow researchers to "experiment" with conversational understanding, and learn how people really talk to each other. Naturally, for a bot that's available through Twitter and messaging platforms Kik and GroupMe, the AI is already filling the role of a millennial; emojis are included in its vocabulary, and it's explicitly aimed at 18-24-year-olds in the US, Microsoft says. The bot appears to have little practical function for users, but is capable of three different methods of communication: its website tay.ai boasts the AI can talk via text, play games (such as guessing the meaning of a string of emojis) and comment on photos sent to it.