Both theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to destroy humanity. Established geniuses as they are, their words don't seem to have resonated with Dag Kittlaus, the brains behind Siri, the beloved virtual assistant for iPhone. Ignoring words of caution pertaining to pending doom, the Norwegian, along with his team, have given birth to yet another AI, Viv. Dubbed "The Global Brain", this cloud-based virtual assistant is being called the next generation AI assistant. But the question is, is it?

Artificial intelligence: students were surprised to learn they had been dealing with a bot all semester. To help with his class this year, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor's overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson's true identity to students until after they'd turned in their final exams.

One of the hottest topics the last few years or so have been around AI in all it's forms, everything from being simple female-named chatting tools, to domesday predictions AI that will kill us all, or just make us fat and obsolete in the workplace. So far what we've seen and be able to play with has mostly been in the form of chat bots, helping us navigate through over complicated websites or get some very limited customer service help. November 6, 2001 "Treehouse of Horror XII" was aired, with Pierce Brosnan starring as Ultrahouse 3000. An smart building AI that becomes attracted to Marge and decides to get rid of Homer, attempting to kill him by dumping him into the dining room table's garbage disposal. Alas containing many of the common fears of what an AI eventually will do to us.

To a class of over 300 students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there didn't seem to be anything unusual about the new teaching assistant, Jill Watson. They never met Ms. Watson, but she always responded to emails quickly and casually. Like any good TA, Ms. Watson's involvement was low-key but helpful. "She was the person –well, the teaching assistant– who would remind us of due dates and post questions in the middle of the week to spark conversations," student Jennifer Gavin told the Journal. Some students envisioned their TA as a young PhD hopeful.

A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google's search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo, Recode has learned. Google's device will resemble its OnHub wireless router, according to several sources. We don't know if it has a name yet, but internally the project goes by "Chirp." The Information previously reported that Google was plotting a competing version of Echo, a portable speaker with voice assistant tech. Sources said the device is unlikely to launch next week at Google's I/O developer conference, but plans are for it to land at some point this year.

The Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal opened in 2006 - the same year that Twitter launched. So, you'd think that when one of the tech sector's biggest events - TechCrunch Disrupt New York - moved to the birthplace of hipsters, that cutting-edge development and a good amount of facial hair would be on display. But this year's New York Disrupt didn't seem very disruptive. TechCruch's biggest Disrupt conference in San Francisco, its London version, and past New York events have always attracted innovative technology developers. Jordan Crook, senior writer for TechCrunch, was unconcerned by what seemed to be a slow burn in the sector, even in areas like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. "It's easy to see with hindsight that what seemed to be a slow transition was really a massive shift," she says.

Google is offering Parsey McParseface and SyntaxNet to interested developers that want to integrate artificial intelligence to their application and system projects without having to build their own platform from scratch. SyntaxNet will be an open-sourced neural network framework that can be used by developers to create software that could have the capabilities to understand how the human language works. Google is also rolling out Parsey McParseface as a parser for the English language. AI is a highly-complicated subject but there is no doubt that the advancements in technology has improved the platform. Digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Cortana are products of good AI technology.

A Kansas Tinder user was recently kidnapped, beaten and held against her will for six days by a man she met via the app. Shane Steven Allen faces one charge of kidnapping and four of aggravated battery. Should the convictions go through, Allen could serve a 32 year prison sentence. The woman, a 20 year-old student at the University of Kansas, was kidnapped on April 12th and was returned to her sorority on April 18th with multiple injuries including a pair of black eyes, broken blood vessels in her eyes and multiple bruises and abrasions, according to local news outlet Lawrence Journal World.

The winds of change are blowing through Silicon Valley--not terribly unusual, granted, considering that something new seems to come out of that part of the world several times a year. But this time, we seem to be witnessing the opening of what promises to be a sea of change in computing: The joining of all our devices--including computers, smartphones, smart homes, and even smart cars--with the virtual synapses of a serviceable artificial intelligence, complete with realistic conversational abilities. We've already seen some earlier attempts at realizing this dream. But, some sassy dialogue notwithstanding, these machine "intelligences" have notorious limitations, something the designers of the newest entrant on the scene, Viv, hope to do away with once and for all. Viv's creators, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer--who also created Siri, before selling it to Apple--hope that their newest creation will become the portal through which users interface with the internet.

When you inform Siri to set an alarm for five am, she'll set an alarm for five am. However for those who begin asking her which prescription ache killer is least more likely to upset your abdomen, she's probably not gonna know what to do--simply because that's a reasonably difficult sentence. Siri is a great distance from what laptop scientists name "pure language understanding." She will be able to't actually perceive the pure manner we people discuss--regardless of the way in which Apple portrays her in all these TV advertisements. In actual fact, we shouldn't actually be speaking about her as a "her" in any respect.