Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. SEE ALSO: Here's why those tech billionaires are throwing millions at ethical AI "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

We are entering the era of talking machines--and it's about more than just asking Amazon's Alexa to turn down the music. General Electric has built a digital assistant into its cloud service for managing power plants, jet engines, locomotives, and the other heavy equipment it builds. Over the internet, an engineer can ask a machine--even one hundreds of miles away--how it's doing and what it needs. Fast Company got an exclusive demonstration of the technology before its debut at GE's Minds Machines conference in San Francisco. Voice controls are built on top of GE's Digital Twin program, which uses sensor readings from machinery to create virtual models in cyberspace.

"Mandy Monroe" works relentlessly to reach out to customers of Lee Kia of Greenville in North Carolina to schedule service appointments. A consistent revenue generator, Mandy doesn't complain, gossip, make personal phone calls on company time or pop chewing gum. Mandy doesn't even take bathroom breaks. That's because Mandy is a cyberstaffer driven by artificial intelligence. The virtual assistant, created by the software provider Conversica, conducts email conversations with dealership service customers.

After decades on every sci-fi fan's wish list, personal robots are on the cusp of entering our homes. Now it's time to put them to work. Everyone knows Pepper, the child-sized humanoid robot launched back in 2014 who was created to welcome visitors to SoftBank Mobile stores in Japan. Now Pepper has scored a few jobs in the US, from giving directions in a shopping mall in San Francisco to pouring beer at Oakland International Airport's Pyramid Taproom. The diminutive Pepper is not alone, not even at airports.

Only Homo sapiens, of all the descendants of Homo erectus, survived on earth whereas other species such as homo soloensis, homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis faded away more than 40,000 years ago. What advantages did Homo sapiens possess that helped them to flourish while other species are extinct? Apparently a cognitive revolution (according to Prof. Yuval Harari in his famous book Sapiens) triggered by some kind of genetic mutation provided Homo Species with more cerebral power and thus they acquired an ability not possessed by any other species – ability to imagine things that did not exist. This ability helped them to invent things including powerful communicative languages, religion, tools and more. Does current cognitive revolution ushered under various nomenclatures such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing etc provide more powers, this time to machines and bring in unprecedented progress to human life? Are public and private institutions geared towards initiating, leading and supporting this change?

Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities. Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as word2vec, was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding. Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space. The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.

Behind the scenes, the same call automatically and invisibly decides whether a machine learning classifier is reliable enough to classify the example on its own, or whether human intervention is needed. Models get built automatically, they're continually retrained, and the caller never has to worry whether more data is needed. In the rest of this article, we'll go into more detail on the problems we described above--problems that are common to all efforts to deploy machine learning to solve real-world problems. In order to train any spam classifier, you'll first need a training set of "spam" and "not spam" labels.

Whether you want to start an artificial intelligence company as an entrepreneur, evaluate AI-driven vendors as an enterprise client, or simply learn more about new technology breakthroughs, you'll need to understand how successful investors think. Through funding, advisory, connections, and operational support, investors enable innovative companies to grow and drive overall industry trends. That's why we spoke with dozens of venture capitalists who've made recent investments in artificial intelligence companies. To help you understand how different investors approach AI, we compiled 15 unique and varied opinions that exemplify the diversity of opportunities for artificial intelligence to change our world. Max Gazor of CRV believes AI will be most disruptive to industries where there's "too much data for humans to process, a severe shortage of expert talent, and a high willingness to pay for even small productivity boosts." Cybersecurity fits these criteria perfectly.

Apple's Siri voice assistant picks up a few new tricks each year, but in 2017, it may get a lot brainier. The Cupertino, California-based tech titan plans to enhance Siri with artificial intelligence, DigiTimes reports. We're hoping Siri keeps getting smarter as time passes. That fits with other rumors that the next iPhone, possibly called the iPhone 8, will mark its 10-year anniversary with big changes like an edge-to-edge display and glass body. A much more proactive Siri that can learn your behavior would be a welcome addition to this list. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a budding trend among phones for 2017.

Will we have to give up our privacy to get better AI from Apple? According to the new "iCloud Analytics & Privacy" terms, it looks like it. So, it is still voluntary. True is, though, that the more people do it the better AI (Siri and smart suggestions) we get. But is this worth more than our privacy?