Silicon Valley was taken aback when Bloomberg profiled a 26-year-old named George Hotz in December who said he had single-handedly built a self-driving car in his garage. It was true that Hotz was an accomplished hacker, being the first person to jailbreak an iPhone. But could a solo effort comprised of 13 cameras really produce results to rival the work of giants like Google, Ford, and General Motors, not to mention well-funded upstarts like Tesla? The skepticism has turned to validation, as Hotz--who made a name for himself by hacking the first iPhone and later, the Playstation 3--has received 3.1 million in funding, led by one of the Valley's most prestigious firms, Andreesen Horowitz. A partner at the firm, Chris Dixon, wrote on Medium that he had tested Hotz's car, brought AI experts to inspect it, and generally "dug deep" into the system.

Salesforce.com Inc. is acquiring MetaMind, an artificial-intelligence startup that specializes in deep-learning services, boosting its capabilities for the new technology. The Palo Alto, California-based company helps business users employ deep learning technology, which trains networks of computers to mimic the human brain's ability to recognize and analyze pictures or text without explicit instructions. The acquisition will help Salesforce offer AI capabilities to automate and personalize customer support, marketing and many other business processes, MetaMind said on its website. "We thought about how to maximize our impact with deep learning and we feel like Salesforce is the best place to do that," Richard Socher, MetaMind's chief executive officer, said in an interview. Salesforce is boosting its focus on machine learning and automation as it looks for new ways to bolster its approach to helping customers tackle sales with their own clients.

Whether we realize it or not, machine learning is already a part of our everyday lives. Think about a simple Google search, a quick query to Apple's Siri, an afternoon visit to Facebook, or, of course, a great product recommendation on Amazon. As the prevalence of high-performance computing continues to grow, the thought of computers doing things we could only dream of is exhilarating and, for many, almost magical. This is especially true when it comes to marketing. Yet, as we apply machine learning to marketing and unique business goals, oftentimes all of that mystery and intrigue turn to disillusion and struggle with the practical applications.

Today, I'm thrilled to share the news that Salesforce has acquired MetaMind. We couldn't be more excited to join Salesforce. Over the past year and a half, we've been on a mission to empower business users with state of the art deep learning technology to simplify, improve and automate decision making. And now, we'll be able to continue our journey at Salesforce on a much larger scale, with the resources and ecosystem of one of the world's most innovative and influential enterprise software companies. With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes.

Our client, a known entity in the eCommerce space is looking for a Research Scientist to join their innovative team. They use machine learning and statistical techniques. They build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage the trust and safety of loads of transactions every day. Please be excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and create state-of-art algorithms to solve real world problems. They are looking for candidates who want to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company.

Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women. This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like "Her" and "Ex Machina" reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity.

Salesforce has acquired MetaMind, a deep learning startup backed by Salesforce cofounder and chief executive Marc Benioff. The startup's services will stop working on May 4. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. "Salesforce plans to integrate MetaMind's technology into Salesforce services," MetaMind cofounder and chief executive Richard Socher wrote in a blog post. "For unpaid web users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4. For our monthly recurring users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on June 4. We'll delete any data we have stored for unpaid web users and monthly recurring users after April 11." Deep learning is a type of artificial intelligence that many large technology companies -- like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter -- have invested in by way of acquisitions or in-house research.

Salesforce just bought another startup in the machine learning space, an area the cloud software maker has been doubling down on recently. The startup is called MetaMind, a startup that specializes in artificial intelligence using natural language and image recognition technology. It's raised 8 million so far from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The announcement was made through a blog post on MetaMind's website. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

This article, 10 artificial intelligence insiders to follow on Twitter, originally appeared on TechRepublic.com. With the flood of news on self-driving cars, drones, caring robots, and more, it isn't always easy to keep up-to-date with the latest in the artificial intelligence universe. For the insiders' view on what's happening in AI, follow these 10 researchers, professors, institutions, and other great thinkers who offer human insight into the world of machines. Author of the recently released Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Ford is an important voice in conversations about the future of the workplace and the debate over whether automation will replace humans in the job market. Zhang, a leading software engineer, was a recent speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 conference.

Last week at Microsoft's Build conference, CEO Satya Nadella said that the future of the company was "conversation as platform." In other words, less Windows and Office, and more Cortana and Tay--conversational interfaces that can understand the natural language of human users. If Nadella thought he was expressing some unique vision of the future, though, he was fooling himself. The idea of conversational UI has quickly colonized nearly every corner of Silicon Valley over the past year. Now seems like a good time to ask: What is a conversational interface?