In a speech today at Web Summit, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer laid out a vision for the role artificial intelligence and machine learning will play in the company's ambitions to improve global connectivity, technology accessibility, and human computer interaction. "People want to stay connected and close to other people, so whatever is the best current technology to deploy that is the business we want to be in," said Schroepfer. Large companies like Facebook play an incredibly important role in the artificial intelligence and machine learning ecosystem. Their sheer size and ability to corner the market on talent makes almost every strategic decision they make an industry-wide declaration. Despite setbacks, like the explosion of Facebook's satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this summer, the company remains steadfast in its goals to better connect the world.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. As artificial intelligence and machine learning mature and manifest their potential to take on complicated tasks, we've become somewhat expectant that robots can succeed where humans have failed -- namely, in putting aside personal biases when making decisions. But as recent cases have shown, like all disruptive technologies, machine learning introduces its own set of unexpected challenges and sometimes yields results that are wrong, unsavory, offensive and not aligned with the moral and ethical standards of human society. While some of these stories might sound amusing, they do lead us to ponder the implications of a future where robots and artificial intelligence take on more critical responsibilities and will have to be held responsible for the possibly wrong decisions they make. At its core, machine learning uses algorithms to parse data, extract patterns, learn and make predictions and decisions based on the gleaned insights.

Facebook users will be able to record smartphone videos that ape the style of famous artworks with a new feature unveiled Tuesday. Using a technique called style transfer, the feature takes live video and turns it into something that resembles the work of Van Gogh, Picasso and other artists. That effect is probably familiar to people who have used the app Prisma, which uses similar techniques to change the look of photos. Prisma's app can't perform live filtering, and some filters require a connection to the internet. Facebook's system can work offline and render live.

If you're a whip-smart investor with big bucks to spend, chances are you've got your fingers in the AI pie. It's a market where $50 million is chump change, so if you really want to play with the high rollers you'll need more room on the check. Sentient's up to $144 million in an AI platform play, while Vicarious Systems has thrown $67 million at AI algorithms. So it's pretty fair to say that if you're a bot, you're going to enjoy a top-notch private education. What's made machine learning and AI the hot stuff du jour?

Almost a year ago, we published our now-annual landscape of machine intelligence companies, and goodness have we seen a lot of activity since then. This year's landscape has a third more companies than our first one did two years ago, and it feels even more futile to try to be comprehensive, since this just scratches the surface of all of the activity out there. As has been the case for the last couple of years, our fund still obsesses over "problem first" machine intelligence--we've invested in 35 machine intelligence companies solving 35 meaningful problems in areas from security to recruiting to software development. At the same time, the hype around machine intelligence methods continues to grow: the words "deep learning" now equally represent a series of meaningful breakthroughs (wonderful) but also a hyped phrase like "big data" (not so good!). We care about whether a founder uses the right method to solve a problem, not the fanciest one.

Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to. For example, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program defeated South Korean Master Lee Se-dol in the board game Go earlier this year, the terms AI, machine learning, and deep learning were used in the media to describe how DeepMind won.

Written by C. Raja Mohan Updated: November 8, 2016 12:21 am Media reports say an artificial intelligence (AI) system called MogIA, developed by Sanjiv Rai, an innovator based in Mumbai, has predicted that Donald Trump will win Tuesday's presidential elections in the United States. Unveiled in 2004, the system apparently got it right in the last three presidential elections. It also predicted that Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Rai is quoted as saying that the algorithm got even better as it has "learnt" from the last few rounds. MogIA is named after Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

The world's smartest CRM platform has just taken another big step forward by introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the launch of Salesforce Einstein. Salesforce Einstein is basically AI built into the core of the Salesforce Platform, delivering advanced AI capabilities to sales, service, and marketing by helping to discover insights, predict outcomes, recommend best next steps and automate tasks. By covering these three areas you can anticipate sales opportunities with Sales Cloud Einstein, proactively resolve cases with Service Cloud Einstein and create predictive journeys with Marketing Cloud Einstein. In addition, the AI service covers commerce, community, analytics, IoT and customers can embed intelligence to create AI-powered apps with App Cloud Einstein. The new platform upgrade service wraps around your existing Salesforce and learns from all your data, including CRM data, email, calendar, social, ERP, and IoT, and then delivers predictions and recommendations in context of what you're trying to do.

Inarguably, technology has shaped the current state of procurement. At the Global Procurement Tech Summit, it was evident how true this has become. IBM's Vice President of Global Procurement Dan Carrell gave a presentation putting the topic into perspective. He shed light on how a massive corporation deals with procurement and even how IBM's Watson is helping their procurement processes. Procurement to go through Digital Transformation… like other industries!

Berg Health's cofounder and chief executive Niven R. Narain is used to being laughed out of rooms, given his interest in bringing artificial intelligence into the drug development process. But things have changed, he says, thanks to growing excitement around the practice known as precision medicine. This afternoon, at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Narain spoke on a panel on the topic of bringing advanced technologies to medicine with industry experts from Mount Sinai and Columbia University. Precision medicine is an all-encompassing term, which broadly refers to the idea of treating patients in a more personalized, targeted way rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to disease. The White House announced a $215 million investment in precision medicine earlier this year; if nothing else, it generated a lot of hype.