NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) was one of the hottest tech stocks of 2016, jumping 230% over the past 12 months. The company makes the vast majority of its revenue from gaming -- about 62% in the fiscal fourth quarter 2017 -- but NVIDIA is much more than just a a gaming processor company. The artificial intelligence (AI) market is quickly expanding and NVIDIA is positioning itself to make big gains in the space. According to an investor note published by Goldman Sachs' Toshiya Hari a couple of months ago, NVIDIA's total addressable market in AI and deep learning could be as big as $5 billion to $10 billion -- out of a total market of $40 billion. Hari mentioned that NVIDIA already has a lead in the AI space and that the company's competition "continues to face high barriers to entry."

As machine learning gains traction in digital businesses, technical professionals must explore and embrace it as a tool for creating competitive advantage. We discuss the benefits and pitfalls of machine learning, the requirements of its architecture, and how to get started.

If voice assistants really are the next big user interface, then Amazon is off to fantastic start -- by the numbers, at least. As this chart from Statista shows, Amazon's Alexa assistant now has more than 10,000 "skills" (i.e., third-party voice-enabled applications). That's double the amount that was available just last quarter. To be clear: That developers are interested in Alexa is good news for Amazon, and Alexa itself seems to be well ahead in the home compared to rivals like Google Assistant, the AI found in the Google Home speaker that competes directly with the Alexa-centric Amazon Echo. Calling up an Uber or ordering a pizza just by yelling across the room is convenient enough, but for every useful skill, there are 500 CorkOrnaments.com

Health Catalyst and the Regenstrief Institute are working together to commercialize nDepth, Regenstrief's natural language processing technology. Indianapolis-based Regenstrief developed the technology to harness unstructured data. Salt-Lake City-based Health Catalyst, a data warehousing and analytics company, has been in the business of extracting data to boost care quality since it launched in 2008. It was developed within the Indiana Health Information Exchange, the largest and oldest HIE in the country. Regenstrief fine-tuned nDepth through extensive and repeated use, searching more than 230 million text records from more than 17 million patients.

When it comes to public cloud-based IoT platforms, Amazon and Microsoft have fierce competition from an unexpected corner – IBM. While the company hasn't seen much traction with SoftLayer (IaaS), and Bluemix (PaaS), it's upping the ante on IoT and Cognitive Computing. IBM Watson is slowly but steadily gaining customer adoption. From Visa to BMW to Bosch to Kone, Watson now boasts of some impressive partnerships. IBM recently hosted a two-day briefing at its newly minted IoT facility in Munich.

Amazon is working to make its Alexa a better listener. The Seattle-based technology giant has been developing a feature that would allow the voice assistant that powers its Echo line of speakers to distinguish between individual users based on their voices, according to people familiar with Amazon's Alexa strategy. The sources declined to be identified by name because they are not authorized to talk about the company's future product plans. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. Alexa, like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana, can interpret and respond to voice commands such as "How's the weather?" or "What movies are playing tonight?"

Here's something to think about – if machine learning is about teaching a computer to think like humans do, can they be taught to think like a specific person? And if they can think like a great artist, could they also create art like one? To test this idea, IBM's cognitive computing engine Watson has been tasked with trying to think like Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan modernist whose fusion of organic and orient-inspired architecture permeates his home city of Barcelona. There, during the Mobile World Congress conference taking place at the moment, a team of designers from New York agency SOFTLab will create a sculpture, "informed" by Watson. In preparation the IBM machine learning system was fed hundreds of images of Gaudi's work, as well as images related to Barcelona and its culture.

Universities are to get £17 million to help develop pioneering robotics. Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics which can "transform how we live, work, travel and learn" are in line for a boost in the Government's digital strategy. Universities will get £17 million to help them develop pioneering robotics and AI as part of the plans to support the "booming" sector, which is behind smartphone voice and touch recognition technology and digital assistants such as the iPhone's Siri. AI also forms the bedrock of video games and music and film recommendations services, as well as improving online customer services, and is used in fraud detection tools used by banks. Among the projects supported with the money from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a move by the University of Manchester to develop autonomous robots for hazardous environments such as nuclear facilities.

Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google's parent Alphabet, filed suit against Uber on Thursday alleging that the ride-share company engaged in the "calculated theft" of its self-driving technology. The suit is the latest setback for Uber, still reeling from the viral #DeleteUber campaign and which this week launched an "urgent investigation" into claims of sexual harassment. The lawsuit, filed in US district court in San Francisco, contains explosive allegations that a former Waymo employee, Anthony Levandowski, plotted to steal Waymo's technology and trade secrets before leaving to start his own self-driving truck company, Otto. Uber acquired Otto in August 2016, reportedly for $680m. At the center of the suit is Waymo's proprietary LiDAR system – the "eyes" that self-driving cars use to see other vehicles, the road and pedestrians.

Today's artificial intelligence is certainly formidable. It can beat world champions at intricate games like chess and Go, or dominate at Jeopardy!. It can interpret heaps of data for us, guide driverless cars, respond to spoken commands, and track down the answers to your internet search queries. And as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs that robots can't take care of--or so Elon Musk recently speculated. He suggested that we might have to give our own brains a boost to stay competitive in an AI-saturated job market.