Google declined to comment on the report, which states that the initiative will be led by longtime Google VP of engineering Anna Patterson and involve a rotating cast of engineers instead of the venture investors who work for Alphabet Inc.'s corporate venture unit, GV. It isn't completely surprising that Google might create an investing practice around AI, particularly given Google CEO Sundar Pichai's recent pronouncement that Google is becoming "AI first" rather than "mobile first." Indeed, AI was the running thread throughout the recent Google I/O developer conference, where the company introduced new tensor processing unit (TPU) chips that promise to more quickly train and run AI models for researchers and businesses; it also announced (among many other things) that its Google Assistant, the company's virtual personal assistant that's available on devices like the Google Home and Pixel phone, will soon grow more conversational. According to Axios, Patterson and company will reportedly be co-investing with GV when it makes sense to do so.

Yoshua Bengio has never been one to take sides. As one of the three intellects who shaped the deep learning that now dominates artificial intelligence, he has been catapulted to stardom. It's a field so new the people who can advance it fit into one room together, and everyone--from tech startups to multinational conglomerates and the department of defense--wants a share of their minds. But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. "I want to remain a neutral agent," he says as he sips rust-colored licorice water, which he pours from a carafe that acts as a weight for the mess of papers cluttering his desk. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. Like the nuclear scientists of the last century, Bengio understands that the tools he's invented are powerful beyond measure and must be cultivated with great forethought and widespread consideration. "We don't want one or two companies, which I will not name, to be the only big players in town for AI," he says, raising his eyebrows to indicate that we both know which companies he means. One eyebrow is in Menlo Park; the other is in Mountain View. That's why Bengio has recently chosen to forego his neutrality, signing on with Microsoft.

Forget the artificial intelligence doomsday storylines you've seen in Terminator or The Matrix – AI is gaining traction and is here to help you in ways you couldn't have dreamed of. It's time to move past Siri and find out how AI can help you with your business. If you haven't already begun integrating it into your everyday life, you're falling behind the curve. You might have already had contact with AI without realizing. Faisal Khan, a cross-border money transfer specialist, has a story about chatting with a CEO and telling him he'd like to send his secretary something for New Year's Eve. The CEO replied, saying, "Uh, Amy's a bot.

As artificial intelligence grows and develops from tech companies and investors, it's likely to disrupt a variety of industries. But one prominent tech industry figure thinks it could also extend to the medical field. In a panel discussion at MIT Tuesday, investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla said he believes AI could be powerful enough to replace human oncologists, VentureBeat reported. "I can't imagine why a human oncologist would add value, given the amount of data in oncology," Khosla said. "They can't possibly comprehend all of the things that are possible."

It was interesting to note the impact of social pressure. In general, people were more comfortable using voice commands when by themselves first, then with friends next, and then not so much with people they don't know very well. As an exception to this, people feel a bit more self-conscious about doing so when in a restaurant by themselves, and the presence of friends made them more likely to use voice commands with their smartphones (it grew from 23.1% to 28.4% of people being likely or very likely to do so). Some of our respondents were even likely or very likely to use voice commands in a public restroom (13%) or in a theater (7.7%).

Remember just a few years ago when your customers started tweeting at you, angry about a delayed flight, complaining loudly about a poor product or "the worst service ever!"? At least you had a social media presence -- unlike some of your competitors -- but I bet it really took time and effort to learn how to use social media effectively. It may even have caused substantial public embarrassment and pain along the way. Here's the thing: this kind of breakdown will happen again and again in the near future -- and across more and more new platforms and contexts. Your relationship with your customers will constantly be at stake.

Alexa just got another new skill. Starting today, SiriusXM subscribers will be able to play any of the radio's available channels through their Alexa devices, depending on the package they're subscribed to. Howard Stern announced the news this morning on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show. Other recent Alexa upgrades have included extending the AI assistant's voice control to all video streaming services, adding the ability to set reminders as well as iCloud calendar support. Google's Home has also been getting new features to boost its utility, though SiriusXM is not yet one of them.

While several U.S. banks are developing or piloting virtual assistants based on artificial intelligence, Singapore's largest bank has been using an AI-powered chatbot to run its digital-only bank in India for about a year. The results so far are impressive: Eighty-two percent of all customer support for digibank by DBS is handled through the bot, helping the company run the unit at about a fifth of the cost of running a traditional bank. A look at how this bot is working in other parts of the world gives a sense of how the technology is likely to play out in the U.S., as banks like Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo experiment in the space. Indeed, according to Sandeep Lal, group head of digital bank at DBS, the company's goal in pioneering the chatbot is to shape the future of banking. The bank is using Kasisto's virtual assistant, which started life in 2010 as a project of SRI (the research institute where Siri was developed) and BBVA called Lola, where it was trained to answer questions the way a human customer service representative would.

Alexa, play Sirius XM for me. The satellite radio subscription service today joins the offerings on Amazon's Echo speaker, with its 200 channels that include music, sports and talk show host Howard Stern. Sirius joins Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeart Radio and TuneIn radio as music choices customers can request by voice. Ben Shepherd, head of Amazon Alexa music, said Sirius has been a major request from Echo owners. "It's something they really wanted to listen to," he says.

Artificial Intelligence has been around for a long time but it is only recently that it has gotten a seat at the adult table due its potential to develop tools that can think and adapt like the human brain. Not only is it slowly becoming more sentient but it is also exponentially faster in processing and making decisions based on the given parameters. Virtually every industry benefits from Artificial Intelligence but AI is uniquely qualified for use in an HR capacity due to it's appetite for repetitive analytic functions. It provides even-tempered analysis, unbiased results and the ability to collate copious of data from disparate sources. A future with AI is inevitable. However it has been a topic of much debate as to whether it will be a utopian or dystopian one.