While Tay is offline, Microsoft will use the incident as a lesson to fortify the AI chatbot against similar attacks.

Building technology companies worth tens of billions of pounds often requires one or two exceptionally talented individuals with strong computer science backgrounds and entrepreneurial spirits. Finding these people can be time consuming and difficult, which is why a couple of UK organisations have turned to artificial intelligence and software. In the last month, Founders Forum, a network of successful startup founders and business leaders, and company builder Entrepreneur First, have both revealed they are using artificial intelligence (AI) and custom-built software to identify the UK's most promising founders. Founders Forum, set up by serial entrepreneur and lastminute.com "An AI simulates what a human might do but at scale; with more data and no bias," said Dr Tom Bowles, data scientist and founder in residence at Founders Factory, a startup accelerator launched by Brent Hoberman.

Using AI and data science, an MIT team was able to accurately predict rogue waves coming out of the blue in the middle of the ocean, in near real time, to help sailors change their navigation path and avoid destruction and death. Rogue waves, while rare, are unpredictable, tall (up to 100 feet) and devastating. The physical mechanism producing these waves is well understood, and is typically modeled using rotating elements. Out of curiosity, I produced a video a few years ago, with rotating elements - this was a pure mathematical simulation just for fun - and it turns out that it models pretty well the mechanism that turns regular waves into rogue waves. The intent was to have some mathematical fun: indeed I called my video "belly dancing mathematics" as it also models that process quite well.

You probably saw a video showing the latest humanoid creation from Boston Dynamics picking up boxes and staggering gamely through the woods. Impressive though those feats are, it seems they may no longer fit with Google's new vision for its robotics research, as Bloomberg is reporting that the subsidiary is to be sold off. After going on something of a robotics-company spending spree in 2014, Google's robotics research project suffered from the departure of the original leader and the man behind Android, Andy Rubin, as well his replacement, James Kuffner. Rumors have been swirling for some time about other departures and a general lack of direction, so it wasn't surprising to see the robotics project reorganized and brought into Google X as part of the company's rebirth as Alphabet. Perhaps it seems surprising that one of Google's most spectacular robotics efforts should be cut loose. According to the Bloomberg story, negative press about robots taking jobs may have played some part in the decision to let the company go.

Career: Baidu, chief scientist, May 2014 to present; co-founder and chairman of Coursera, 2012; Google Brain, project founder and leader, 2011-2012; Stanford University, faculty member since 2002. Ng developed some of the underpinnings of "deep learning," a computer-programming technique that uses powerful neural networks of processors to imitate some of the human brain's functions. The Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab's speech-recognition system, Deep Speech, was named as a "breakthrough" technology by MIT Tech Review in February. A: Yes, our search system is powered by deep learning, but a lot of things at Baidu are powered by deep learning.

Artificial-intelligence whiz Andrew Ng hangs his hat these days at a nondescript building in Sunnyvale that serves as the Silicon Valley outpost of the Chinese search giant Baidu. The modest digs belie Baidu's big Asian footprint. With more than 600 million monthly active mobile users, it's often referred to as "the Google of China." Like Google, Baidu has been exploring artificial intelligence (AI) for use on its servers and other applications. AI is deemed so important by Baidu that two years ago it hired Ng, who founded Google's Brain Team, to be its chief scientist.

By now the world has heard about the rise and fall of Microsoft's Tay, an artificially intelligent bot that lived on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. To better understand where exactly Microsoft went wrong with Tay, I spoke with Brandon Wirtz, the creator of Recognant, a cognitive computing and artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to aid in understanding big data from unstructured sources. Tay's Twitter conversations started out innocently enough, proclaiming her love for humans and wishing that National Puppy Day was every day. Upon analyzing Tay's tweets, Broad Listening found that Tay made four times more negative tweets than that of popular teen celebrities from Disney such as Peyton List, Laura Marano, China McClain, and Kelli Berglund.

By now the world has heard about the rise and fall of Microsoft's Tay, an artificially intelligent bot that lived on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. Tay's goal was to learn and mimic the personality of a 19-year-old woman, and it would appear that popular social networks among millennials were a great place for Tay to learn. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this experiment quickly became an embarrassment after Tay was manipulated by Internet trolls into becoming a racist potty-mouth in less than 24 hours. To better understand where exactly Microsoft went wrong with Tay, I spoke with Brandon Wirtz, the creator of Recognant, a cognitive computing and artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to aid in understanding big data from unstructured sources. Tay's Twitter conversations started out innocently enough, proclaiming her love for humans and wishing that National Puppy Day was every day.

Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Life like robotics/artificial intelligence have been making great strides recently. Microsoft has tried to create a twitter bot that can hold a twitter conversation with 18-24 year olds (it failed miserably). Now, at SXSW, we see Sophia. An extremely life like looking robot than can actually maintain a relatively normal conversation (all be it still a bit robotic). "Do you want to destroy humans?" – Interviewer "Ok…I will destroy humans" – Sophia The funny/scary thing is that the creator actually programmed her to be able to say the words'destroy humans' when asked about the scenario.