Microsoft launched support for text chat bots in Skype earlier this week and now a new bot made by the company is showing off what these AI creations can do. "Project Murphy" adds a new bot to your Skype contacts and then you can ask it "What if..." questions. The end result is a merging of two images that attempts to answer that question. Microsoft says that "Project Murphy" was a result of combining several of the company's services, such as Bing Image Search, Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Lake and PowerBI. Could we tap into this human creativity to build a robot that could use machine learning capabilities and create accurate and imaginative images based on the what-if questions it was being asked?

Although AI hasn't yet taken off in the enterprise market, it soon may. AI could be used to enhance customer service, provide companies with recommendations based on data analytics, root out fraud or help manufacturers find defects in products before they're shipped. The market for AI in the business world is going to heat up, according to research firm IDC, which predicts that the market for cognitively enabled applications and software is going to be worth 40 billion in 2020. One kind of AI that has gotten a lot of attention lately is machine learning, an artificial intelligence that can learn from and make predictions based on data it accesses. Google is building the technology into the company's cloud product in hopes of winning enterprise business.

One of the key driving forces behind supply chain augmented reality is artificial intelligence. AI is making an impression on day-to-day life with Amazon's Echo, Microsoft's Cortana, and Apple's Siri. It is also ready to change the supply chain in profound ways. Artificial Intelligence Computer software created to interact with human capabilities and make decisions is artificial intelligence. The futuristic supply chain will leverage powerful AI to its benefit.

Formula E has unveiled the AI-powered race car that will be used in its Roborace competition for driverless vehicles. Ten teams, each with two cars, will compete in a series of one-hour races over the Formula E championship season, which starts later this year. All teams will have the same driverless cars; what sets them apart will be the artificial intelligence they use to control them. Formula E announced the Roborace series last year, calling it a "battle of algorithms." The driverless cars will reportedly hit speeds of 300kph (186mph).

Over the weekend Google DeepMind's alphaGo program defeated one of the world's leading professional Go players, Lee Sedol, in a best-of-five unhandicapped Go matchup. The final tally was 4–1 in favor of alphaGo, and a profound reality is upon us: a major stronghold of superior human intelligence has fallen. This defeat raises important questions for research on human intelligence. What can we learn from continued advances in gameplay artificial intelligence? What role can games play in measuring continued progress in research on intelligence more generally?

This week at the Microsoft Build conference, CEO Satya Nadella spent a lot of time talking up chat bots, robots that help you get stuff done through normal human conversations. But for those of us who remember using Microsoft Office in the 1990s and early 2000s, the concept raises the specter of Clippy -- the paper-clip-shaped, animated help tool that was supposed to answer basic questions in plain speech, but became an icon of annoyance. Clippy debuted to much fanfare in Microsoft Office 97 and appeared in other products, such as Microsoft Publisher. But the negative reaction to Clippy caused Microsoft to gradually phase him out. And by 2008, Clippy had disappeared completely, without a trace or any explanation.

Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew playing an April Fool's Day prank on Kochie. IT'S April Fool's Day today, and Australian companies have gotten into the spirit by having a lend of their customers in some very creative ways. Sunrise co-host Edwina Bartholemew had Kochie fooled when she announced she was engaged to her long time partner Neil Varcoe today. To carry out the joke she used Natalie Barr's ring and put it on her hand. Australia's online dating site eHarmony, in partnership with WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo in Darling Harbour, announced the launch of aHarmony, a revolutionary new dating platform specifically designed for animals, where pet owners can find fluffy, scaly or even prickly partners using eHarmony's famous Compatibility Matching System.

When Tesla CEO, Elon Musk was asked about artificial intelligence, he said it was like'summoning a demon' who shouldn't be called unless you can control it. Yes, this is the founder of the same company whose cars are pushing new limits of technology every day. When Stephen Hawking was asked this same question by BBC, he cautioned the public by saying that any further advancement to artificial intelligence could be a fatal mistake. In another interview, he mentioned that AI has the power to re-design itself and take off on its own whereas humans have slow biological evolution, and they wouldn't be able to compete. Bill Gates, too, expressed his concern about this topic during a Reddit Ask me Anything session.

The machine overlords of the future may now, if it pleases them, eliminate all black and white imagery from the history of their meat-based former masters. All they'll need is this system from Berkeley computer scientist Richard Zhang, which allows a soulless silicon sentience to "hallucinate" colors into any monochrome image. It uses what's called a convolutional neural network (several, actually) -- a type of computer vision system that mimics low-level visual systems in our own brains in order to perceive patterns and categorize objects. Google's DeepDream is probably the most well-known example of one. Trained by examining millions of images of-- well, just about everything, Zhang's system of CNNs recognizes things in black and white photos and colors them the way it thinks they ought to be.

IBM says it wants to make intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans. This week, it shipped the NS16e, its largest brain-inspired computer yet, and has big goals ahead. The company plans to create bigger versions of the NS16e--which was purchased by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--to come closer to matching the scale of a human brain. "Perhaps one day we may see a single rack of neurosynaptic system with as many neurons and synapses as in a human brain," said Jun Sawada, a researcher at IBM, in a blog entry. The brain can be viewed as an extremely power-efficient biological computer.