Watch: Where AI Is Today, and Where It's Going in the Future

A top-selling holiday gift was the AI-powered Amazon Echo; IBM Watson was used to diagnose cancer; and Google DeepMind's system AlphaGo cracked the ancient and complex Chinese game Go sooner than expected. And progress continues in 2017. Neil Jacobstein, faculty chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Singularity University, hit the audience at Singularity University's Exponential Manufacturing Summit with some of the more significant updates in AI so far this year. DeepMind, for example, recently outlined a new method called Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) to tackle "catastrophic forgetting" in machine learning. The method helps neural networks retain previously learned tasks.