The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft's Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.

Microsoft pulled its chatbot, Tay, just a day after launch. Tech giant Microsoft has apologised for unleashing an artificial intelligence called Tay onto the Twittersphere, after she learned how to tweet abusive, racist comments. "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," said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of research at Microsoft, in a blog post. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values." It didn't take long for Tay to learn the dark ways of the web.

If each atom in our universe were itself a universe, then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be about the same as the number of possible positions on the board in the ancient Chinese game of "Go." The game's complexity makes chess look like hopscotch. Until recently, the world's leading minds in artificial intelligence predicted that the world's smartest AIs--which have beat humans at chess by brute force for years now--were still a long, long way from "solving" Go. On March 12, a computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match against 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol and defeated him, 4-1, after Lee and other top professionals predicted he could win 5-0 or 4-1. AlphaGo, developed by Google-owned British company DeepMind, has been awarded the rank of 9-dan, the highest possible professional Go ranking that takes human players decades to achieve.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and 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 Corp to shut it down. 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.

But then GoButler's algorithm technology started studying the way users interacted with heroes. Instead of keeping the human-enabled GoButler service (which would ultimately have required moving the support operation to a place like the Philippines) Hadzaad decided to double-down on the algorithmic-only offering of doing travel bookings exclusively. The idea of intellectual human labor as an unecessary luxury isn't just happening in concierge apps. "We can build machines that are optimized to that one task, and people are not optimized to one task.

Marketers use the word "handmade" to signal that a product is worth an extra couple bucks -- be it cheddar or loafer. But it's not just physical goods that are made more quickly and cheaply by machine. Artificial intelligence is making decisions that would previously be done by humans. In a new post, Fast Company's Sarah Kessler reports on the on-demand concierge startup GoButler, which just went from having humans handle requests to solely relying on algorithms. "My general view is that people will always want convenience, but they're not willing to pay premiums for it," says GoButler CEO Navid Hadzaad.

Amazon announced that Nest thermostats would support Alexa voice controls when it launched the Amazon Dot and Tap earlier his month. Like the Echo, the new devices will also control the Nest. Amazon has been working with multiple companies to make its Alexa platform a central part of the home. Nest has also been reaching out to other companies with Works with Nest system. So hopefully most of your connected home will work together in the near future.

There is much discussion these days about Lambda Architecture and its benefits for developing high performance analytic architectures. It offers a combination of a high performance, low latency ETL with a real-time layer, and a slower, more accurate, and flexible solution that runs in batch. As I work with it, I have learned to appreciate Cassandra's relative "immortality" and fit for such analytic systems. In a complex distributed system it's nice to know you have one component that you can rely on without much tending. Need to be highly available and regionally distributed?

Microsoft has taken its AI chatbot Tay offline after machine learning taught the software agent to parrot hate speech. Tay, introduced on Wednesday as a conversational companion for 18 to 24 year-olds with mobile devices, turned out to be a more astute student of human nature than its programmers anticipated. Less than a day after the bot's debut it endorsed Hitler, a validation of Godwin's law that ought to have been foreseen. Engineers from Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams created Tay as an experiment in conversational understanding. The bot was designed to learn from user input and user social media profiles.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automationBig Performance from Low-Power Hardware. Read more ... » moonshot like the selfWhen is CES 2016, what will be the best gadgets and how much are ticket prices?. Read more ... »-driving car challenges of the earlyHome IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applicationsNvidia Releases Machine Learning Products for Hyperscale Datacenters. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape.