In yet another episode of man versus machine, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University has been absolutely dismantling a team of professional poker players, accumulating a staggering lead of almost $800,000. The showdown takes place as part of the "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" competition which pits a group of four poker pros against the crafty supercomputer Libratus in a heads-up game of No-Limit Texas Hold'em slated to continue for 120,000 hands. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. Since January 11 when the contest initially kicked off, the players have now passed the midway point of the the race, having completed almost 65,000 hands in total. What is more intriguing is that so far Libratus has managed to keep an impressive lead over its human opponents, stacking up a profit of $794,392.

Zweben: As these large technology companies had all the compute power and data streams, it is not surprising that the current momentum for AI started there. But the availability of abundant, affordable compute power in the cloud, and free and open source software for big data and machine learning means that AI is quickly spreading beyond these companies. I think that soon the major constraint will be the ability of companies to attract the talent to work on all the projects they want to undertake.

The market for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is flourishing. Beyond the hype and the heightened media attention, the numerous startups and the internet giants racing to acquire them, there is a significant increase in investment and adoption by enterprises. A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, growing to 62% by 2018. Forrester Research predicted a greater than 300% increase in investment in artificial intelligence in 2017 compared with 2016. IDC estimated that the AI market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product. Meta could help scientists find the latest papers related to their own projects, while assisting funding organizations to collaborate with researchers and identify high-potential areas for investment or impact. What's special about Meta is that its AI recognizes authors and citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000 journals and literature sources. Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that "Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta's data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world."

As people increasingly leverage technology to mediate their lives, from music to news, dating prospects to social feeds, artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the backbone for our future experiences and decision-making. Will this improve our lives or will we soon live in a homogenized world, where chance, error, diversity and serendipity are overridden by algorithms? We'll leverage real-life scenarios and examples from Facebook, Pandora and StarCraft to discuss ways developers are addressing these concerns, and discuss how (and if) we can help humanity avoid the "suburbanization of the mind."

Artificial intelligence that reads and responds to our emotions is the killer app of the digital economy. It will make customers and employees happier--as long as it learns to respect our boundaries. When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement.

The night before his newest poker competition was set to begin, Carnegie Mellon's Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown sat down to play a little No Limit Texas Hold'em against the main competition: the artificial intelligence program they designed called "Libratus." "I was totally wrecked," Sandholm told The Washington Post. But he is not a serious poker player, so that's not such a big achievement. For the past 13 days, however, Libratus has been facing off against four world-champion poker players in a Pittsburgh casino. If it can beat them like it beat Sandholm, it would be an enormous breakthrough.

How do you make a robot toy that's both interesting and affordable? It's a hard problem: Making an interesting robot means giving it intelligence and creative autonomy, and giving a robot intelligence and creative autonomy is generally not compatible with it also being cheap. At CES a few weeks ago, we were introduced to Bots_Alive, a small company of roboticists who have managed to develop a robotic critter with a carefully thought-out animal-like personality. And by hacking an existing robot toy and using your phone as a brain, they're ready to sell it to you for 35 bucks. Bots_Alive is, essentially, selling a replacement brain for Hexbug Spider robots.

Instead of 1-to-1 matching, where the task is to verify if you are who you say you are, this requires the harder 1-to-N matching, where we have to check if you're any one of N persons. Here, N is over 10,000. This also has to have very high accuracy, given that this is a security-critical application.

I found these two papers – in of all places the presentation which Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst are presenting in London this weekend, which they claim is preventing them from responding to the can of worms they have opened by publishing a large, non-anonymized database of OKCupid dating profiles. This seems like it may become an important case in research ethics and data privacy. You may want to look into it. I recommend starting with this post by Oliver Keyes, but Vox, Vice and Thomas Lumley have all picked up the story. At any rate, the culprits cite these two papers that look quite good, and the second is the lead in to a whole special issue on cumulative science from Psychological Methods in 2009.