The technology industry A-list is rushing to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Even the White House is in on the act having developed an open-sourced Facebook chatbot that lets you speak to the President.

Chatting with Rose is really good fun – at least to begin with. She talks about her life in San Francisco, her two chickens and her pet cat. She comes across as funny, quick-witted and interested in what you have to say. But as the conversation proceeds, she turns out to be a rather poor conversationalist. Whenever she can't think of an answer to a question, she tries to change the subject with a question of her own.

Back in early 2015, Google's mysterious DeepMind unveiled an algorithm that could teach itself to play Atari games. Based on deep neural nets, the AI impressively mastered nostalgic favorites such as Space Invaders and Pong without needing any explicit programming -- it simply learned through millions of examples. But the algorithm had a weakness: memory. Without a memory module, it couldn't store away any information it had already mastered. When faced with problems requiring multi-step reasoning, the algorithm faltered.

Artificial intelligence developed by the likes of Google's DeepMind and Elon Musk's OpenAI is taught within the confines of game worlds – including navigating around mazes, dodging deadly cliffs, playing laser tag and flying through space. In a mission to build a general AI capable of solving any problem put in front of it, DeepMind is open-sourcing its game code to everyone. The software and 14 levels from DeepMind Labs will be put on GitHub later this week. And, not to be outdone, Elon Musk's own OpenAI is also releasing its own'computer training ground' called Universe. Universe is open-source software that supports Gym; OpenAI's toolkit for testing its algorithms which help software play games, for example, using a reward scheme.

How do humans recognise face from any given angle? That's a puzzle that scientists at MIT have been trying to solve and as a step towards that ultimate goal have developed a new machine learning system that effectively shows what could be going on inside our brains when facial recognition is being carried out. The work is being dubbed as a study of social intelligence which is an important part of human intelligence by Tomaso Poggio, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM). The paper published in Current Biology described a theory that explains how our visual system learns to compute invariant descriptions of an object and applies to the case of faces where scientists have been able to make the machine recognise a face that it has seen only once from a certain point and scale it to other points. For example the machine would have been trained to see the face from 90 degrees, but not from 45 degrees; however, through its intelligence it learns to recognise the face when it is shown at an angle of 45 degree rotation.

Thanks to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, the terms artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become much more widespread than ever before. They are often used interchangeably and promise all sorts from smarter home appliances to robots taking our jobs. But while AI and machine learning are very much related, they are not quite the same thing. AI is a branch of computer science attempting to build machines capable of intelligent behaviour, while Stanford University defines machine learning as "the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed". You need AI researchers to build the smart machines, but you need machine learning experts to make them truly intelligent.

At 2016's Code Conference, Bill Gates, when asked about AIs, said that "it is the most exciting thing going on right now". He's not the only one who feels that way. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, had the same sentiments. Pichai pointed out, that Google had already been using algorithms to improve its search functions long ago. What is noteworthy, is the fact the 1 out of 5 searches that happen now, is done by voice.

Microsoft today said that starting in early 2017, its Word and PowerPoint applications will be able to automatically come up with descriptions of photos that users can add into documents. Office 365 subscribers will see this first in Word and PowerPoint for PCs. Ordinarily, if you drop a photo into PowerPoint, you can type out an "Alt Text" title and description for the photo. But not everyone does that when they're making slide decks. Then, when a blind person opens the slide deck, they aren't able to understand what's going on in the picture, which could make the slide or the entire deck more difficult to fully grasp.

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