Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told a crowd of tech leaders this week. While Musk's description of an injectable human-computer link may sound like science fiction, top tech executives repeatedly said that artificial intelligence (AI) was on the verge of changing everyday life, during discussion at a conference by online publication Recode this week. It is no secret that tech companies are diving into AI analytics research, an industry that will grow to $70 billion by 2020 from just $8.2 billion in 2013, according to a Bank of America report citing IDC research. AI, which combs through large troves of raw data to predict outcomes and recognize patterns, is already used in web search systems, marketing recommendation functions and security and financial trading programs. The technology will spread to driverless cars and service robots in the future, the Bank of America report said.

Do you believe the warnings from folks like Prof. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others? Is AI the greatest tool humanity will ever create, or are we "summoning the demon"? To quote the head of AI at Singularity University, Neil Jacobstein, "It's not artificial intelligence I'm worried about, it's human stupidity." In a recent Abundance 360 webinar, I interviewed Bryan Johnson, the founder of a new company called Kernel which he seeded with $100 million. To quote Bryan, "It's not about AI vs. humans. In 2007, he founded Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider. In 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million. In 2014, Bryan launched the OS Fund with $100 million of his personal capital to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. His investments include endeavors to cure age-related diseases and radically extend healthy human life to 100 (Human Longevity Inc.), replicate the human visual cortex using ...

In recent months, countless new machine learning tools have been open sourced, including tools from tech giants such as Google. Both machine learning and AI tools tend to place tough demands on hardware resources, though. With that in mind, Cloudera has announced a jointly tested solution with Intel to advance capabilities for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. "Benchmark tests on Cloudera with Apache Spark and the newly released Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL), demonstrate the combined offering can advance machine learning performance over large data sets in less time and with less hardware," the company reports. "This helps organizations accelerate their investments in next generation predictive analytics."

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 7, 2017) - SentinelOne, the company transforming endpoint security by delivering real-time protection powered by machine learning and dynamic behavior analysis, today announced the Deep File Inspection (DFI) engine, a significant new feature to its next-generation endpoint protection platform. The DFI engine identifies and prevents the execution of advanced threats and performs powerful, on-access static analysis to uncover and block file-based malware prior to execution and without any dependence on signatures. With DFI, SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) becomes the only next-generation endpoint protection offering to seamlessly pair advanced static prevention with dynamic behavior-based detection within a single platform. Built with the same advanced machine learning technology that drives the company's award-winning behavior-based detection capabilities, the DFI engine earned SentinelOne EPP top scores across several validation test reports from AV Comparatives and AV-TEST, making it the first certified AV replacement for MacOS. "Legacy antivirus is simply no match for today's sophisticated file-based malware, which proliferates much faster than new signatures can be created," said Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne.

There has been trepidation among marketers when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). The main concern seems to be, "is it coming for my job?" The reality is AI, and particularly the subset of machine learning, are tools that can help marketers do their jobs more effectively -- not replace them altogether. A good starting place for understanding how this works is defining what exactly AI and machine learning mean. Misuse of these terms to date has led to plenty of confusion on what AI entails and what it's capable of.

When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), do you imagine Will Smith battling humanoid robots? Well, think again…did you know that AI is already being applied in the Internet, helping you go about your daily life without drawing attention to itself? Artificial intelligence simulates traditionally human processes like learning, reasoning and self-correction. Unlike traditional programs, AI-based applications don't need to be continually fed data or manually coded to make changes to their functionality and output. AI can be (and already is) immensely useful to B2B professionals in all industries. Most people tend to think of "strong" AI examples like IBM's Watson, but "weak" or "narrow" AI is more common and useful to our businesses and everyday lives.

All of a sudden, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere--in consumer products, in our entertainment, in our consciousness. Every day we hear stories from Google, Uber, Baidu, Microsoft, Amazon and others about unprecedented achievements in language translation, gaming, image recognition, music composition, beer-delivering driverless trucks and a host of achievements, all powered by artificial intelligence. But what is artificial intelligence, really? And, to be fair, do we even understand what intelligence is? At least we don't always agree on it.

Influencer marketing is arguably the most sought after form of marketing that exists today. If you're a brand marketer who is looking to quickly spread a message about your brand and start a viral conversation, there is no better way to do it than through influencer marketing. Though this form of social marketing is relatively new, the way that it's been done, until recently, has been highly inefficient. AI, or cognitive computing, has a crucial role to play here. When influencer marketing burst onto the scene a few years back, it caught the attention of talent agencies, as well as upstart influencer agencies, that looked to wrangle up the most impressive stable of influencer talent that they could.

This article is the first in a series of posts that will focus on an exploratory journey of reinforcement based Deep Learning utilizing the VizDoom platform. In terms of goals, my destination is the creation of a Doom AI capable of thriving in a Deathmatch environment (woohoo killer AI). In this particular post I will outline the initial setup process of both Theano, an open source deep learning framework, as well as the VizDoom environmental setup. VizDoom is not the only platform available for reinforcement learning, but it does provide us with an iconic and complicated world for our AI to navigate. Once our environment is properly set up, we will dip our toes into reinforcement learning by running some basic examples and then utilizing some optimization techniques to increase the performance of our AI agent.