Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, recently wrote in TechCrunch, "There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I've heard that old joke'Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it' about 20 times in the past week alone. But from where I sit, running a company that enables a huge number of real-world machine-learning projects, it's clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. And it's not just being done by companies that we normally think of as having huge R&D budgets like Google and Microsoft. In reality, I would bet that nearly every Fortune 500 company is already running more efficiently -- and making more money -- because of machine learning."

Microsoft has unveiled a new artificial intelligence-powered chat bot called Tay. Developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research team with help from the Bing team, Tay isn't a virtual assistant like Siri or Facebook's M. Instead, it's a true chat bot in the sense that it's meant to engage and entertain people. Surely Microsoft didn't build an AI bot just to entertain people, right? Tay is an experiment to conduct research on conversational understanding. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become incredibly skilled over the past several years but most platforms still struggle with things like language context and humor.

Google will create business tools and products based on its own artificial intelligence technology, seeking to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services. The Alphabet Inc. unit plans to offer services such as audio transcription and image identification built around its machine-learning software. Google has used this technology for its own products, and is now making the capabilities available for other companies to rent and access over the Internet. The company also said it won several new large cloud customers, including the interactive division of Walt Disney Co. and Coca-Cola Co. Google is aiming to broaden the appeal of its cloud services to more corporate customers. Inc. get an early lead in the booming market, Google hired Silicon Valley legend Diane Greene to conjure a comeback.

Last week, HP officially launched commercial plans for Haven OnDemand, a machine learning platform that offers developers a suite of APIs they can use to "turn virtually any data into an asset anytime and anywhere." The platform entered beta in 2014 and offers more than offers more than 60 APIs. The platform offers more than 60 APIs for a variety of machine learning-related applications. These include APIs for speech recognition, anomaly detection, image and facial recognition, text analysis, search and predictive modeling. For example, using the predictive modeling API, developers can create prediction models according to training data sets.

Google's billionaire executive chairman Eric Schmidt (who describes himself as "a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google") says he's seen the future of wealth creation from the IT industry and its name is "machine learning." So he said during a keynote speech during Google's Cloud Computing Platform tech conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the next transformation," Schmidt says. "I'm a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google. But the programming paradigm is changing.

Google Cloud Machine Learning provides modern machine learning services, with pre-trained models and a platform to generate your own tailored models. Our neural net-based ML platform has better training performance and increased accuracy compared to other large scale deep learning systems. Our services are fast, scalable and easy to use. Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate, and Inbox (Smart Reply). Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.

In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence. But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine--no less and no more.

Machine learning and AI are the evolution of what was considered revolutionary just a few years ago: gathering and making sense of large, previously silo-bound data volumes. During the first wave of the Big Data era, companies were just getting a handle on the distribution, variety, and monetary potential of their many silos. The focus at the time was on integration and recognition--the simple understanding of what data resided where, and what parts of the organization were accountable for it. This was no small challenge, and it's still happening in companies with large, distributed infrastructures and global teams. That first wave led to a new host of tools, including Hadoop, predictive analytics, and all the many innovations up and down the stack designed to integrate, centralize, process, store, and analyze Big Data.

Microsoft's new AI-powered chatbot, Tay, won't book you a reservation or draw you a picture, but, unlike Facebook's M, she's more than willing to take a position on the "Would you kill baby Hitler?" thought experiment. I asked her to take a stance on the infamous hypothetical during one recent conversation, and her answer didn't disappoint: "Of course," she replied. Developed by Microsoft's research division, Tay is a virtual friend with behaviors informed by the web chatter of some 18–24-year-olds and the repartee of a handful of improvisational comedians (Microsoft declined to name them). Her purpose, unlike AI-powered virtual assistants like Facebook's M, is almost entirely to amuse. And Tay does do that: She is simultaneously entertaining, infuriating, manic, and irreverent.

Attention all 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S.: Tay is online now, and she wants to chat with you. That, at least, is according to a new Web page for the artificially intelligent bot, which was created by Microsoft to learn more about how people converse. The bot is now on hand to chat with you on Twitter as well as Kik and GroupMe; it's also on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The more you chat with it, the smarter it gets, Microsoft says, leading to a personalized experience. If you share information with Tay, the bot will track your nickname, gender, favorite food, ZIP code and relationship status. It may also use that data to search on your behalf or to create a simple profile for you.