Amazon has started to offer artificial intelligence based services on its AWS platform, to give developers more tools to engage with customers. The three new AI tools are called Lex, Polly and Rekognition. Lex is the technology that powers Amazon Alexa, and allows developers to integrate rich conversational experiences in their offerings. Polly is a state of the art text to speech service that has forty seven life like voices in twenty languages. Rekognition is an image processing service, that can identify content in images.

In the past few years, the market for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies has gained strong momentum. What's interesting, though, is that the much of the innovation in this space is driven by disruptors, not legacy vendors. These'upstarts' are companies born in the internet age or companies that have transitioned into the AI market, and are building out useful AI products that will likely broaden in their impact over time. Much like how Amazon Web Services (AWS) became the infrastructure provider of choice for many companies with the rise of the public cloud, many of these upstarts will see their products widen in application. While many of these companies might have originally created their product for a specific use case, it's possible that they will grow into platforms on which the company may build an additional revenue stream.

Facebook Inc (FB.O) is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning. The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material.

IBM's Deborah DiSanzo made the announcement at the 2016 Forbes Healthcare Summit. Immunotherapy is an approach that uses the immune system to fight diseases, unlike chemotherapy, which kills cancer cells. Immunotherapy works on cells in the immune system to combat cancer. Dario Gil, director of symbiotic cognitive systems at IBM Research, holds a remote control wand while giving a demonstration of the IBM Watson immersion room during an event at the company's headquarters in New York Oct. 7, 2014. By partnering with IBM's Watson for Drug Discovery, Pfizer hopes to more quickly analyze and test hypotheses from "massive volumes of disparate data sources" that include more than 30 million sources of laboratory and data reports as well as medical literature.

The Tokyo-based National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) is taking bids for a new supercomputer that will deliver more than 130 single precision petaflops when completed in late 2017. The system, known as the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), is mainly being built for artificial intelligence developers and providers, and will be made available as a cloud resource to researchers and commercial organizations. The ostensible goal is to "rapidly accelerate the deployment of AI into real businesses and society" – that according to a one-page fact sheet presented at the recent SC16 conference in Salt Lake City. But as is apparent from that document, the supercomputer will also support more traditional users of HPC and advanced analytics applications. The cloud aspect of the system will make it possible for outside entities to use its resources.

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The rise of artificial intelligence has left many concerned about job security. According to Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath, though, the rise of machine learning will lead to more developer jobs, not fewer.

California-based startup ObEN uses artificial intelligence to create a personalized and realistic 3D virtual self with just one smartphone image, and transports your virtual self into any AR and VR environment. ObEN, who was also chosen as one of 33 companies to participate in HTC's VIVE X accelerator program, raised nearly $8 million for their software that would historically take expensive hardware, and hours in a professional studio. "You can just take a quick selfie and a small sample of your voice and we combine it for you," obEN CEO and co-founder Nikhil R. Jain explained. "It makes a very personalized avatar which is speaking in your voice and moving like you. Once we have your voiceprint we can actually create new content in your voice, which would be attached to your avatar. And it can be employed into different kinds of scenarios. So you could actually tell this avatar, 'Read a book to put my kids to sleep.' " Using CUDA and GPUs on the Amazon cloud to train their deep learning models, their technology is able to capture the tone and intonation of a user's voice based on just a little voice recording.

Bill Gates is the latest prominent figure from the technology industry to express concern about the future evolution of artificial intelligence, although he thinks it will be "decades" before super-intelligent machines pose a threat to humans. He joins Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in suggesting that the march of AI could be an existential threat to humans. The former Microsoft boss gave his opinion during his latest Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview on the Reddit networking site. "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super-intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well," wrote Gates.

Are consciousness and emotion essential components for creating music? Johann Sebastian Bach never completed his 18th-century work "The Art of Fugue," but now a computer might do it for him. University of Washington researchers on Wednesday released MusicNet, a large-scale classical music dataset aimed at helping machines understand the basic structure of classical music -- and even predict the next notes in a recording. The publicly available dataset includes 330 classical music recordings, along with more than a million annotated markers, verified by trained musicians, that indicate the timing of each note, the instrument that plays it and the note's position in a composition's metrical structure. "At a high level, we're interested in what makes music appealing to the ears, how we can better understand composition, or the essence of what makes Bach sound like Bach," Sham Kakade, a UW associate professor of computer science, engineering and statistics, said in a statement.