The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement -- not so much to professional game players as to Google's competitors. Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry's lingo, the companies are engaged in a "platform war." A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow.

This week, Amazon hosted an exclusive conference that brought together big names from fields such as space exploration, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The event, which was held at the Parker Palm Springs Resort in California, was invite-only and received almost no publicity. Very little is known about the Machine-Learning Automation, Robotics, and Space Exploration (MARS) conference, which is leading some observers to question why Amazon is being so secretive about it. In fact, Amazon has yet to confirm that it even took place, and there have been no press releases or official announcements. However, several guests have shared tidbits about the event on social media.

Yesterday, news emerged that Google was using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called "RankBrain" to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google's overall ranking system? Here's what we know about RankBrain. The information covered below comes from three sources. First, the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain yesterday (see also our write-up of it).

OK, it's not the HAL 9000 (yet) but all over the world, intelligent machines are replacing jobs at an alarming rate. And the smarter they get, the faster they're going to be replacing us. What I am talking about here is not a subtle shift to more automation but a real threat to society and the human race. From self-driving cars and robot waiters to robotic doctors and robot journalists, what seem like novelties today will soon be commonplace. As just one example take Foxconn, the largest private employer in China that contract manufactures of products such as the iPhone, Kindle, Playstation etc.

Google Translate is expected to become the latest product of Google that will benefit from the company's deep learning technology. Deep learning is based on intelligent training of neural networks to analyze lots of data and then make predictions on new data. Google has already used this technology to enhance Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Photos. According to a report, a senior Google official, who has led many high-profile projects and now heads the team involved in deep learning, said that his team is working in tandem with the Translation team to carry out experiments with translations on the basis of deep learning. Google Translate currently operates using different technologies, and this particular development could make it based entirely on neural networks, mainly, long short-term memory network (LSTM).

"Cognitive conversations" with artificial intelligence are "the future" of customer care, IBM's CTO of Watson Europe reckons. Speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 last week, Duncan Anderson explained how AI like IBM Watson is "not Ex Machina" - referring to the 2015 film in which human-like AIs become self-aware - but is now at the point where it can soon make considerable changes to the daily lives of people. "The practical reality of where we are is not Ex Machina - we're not building beautiful computers and spoofing humans, [but] we're solving practical problems today," he said. Anderson said Watson's growing ability to process unstructured data - "text documents, images, voice - the novel data types" - is now bringing to an end the traditional approach of putting such data "in a database clock and [doing] nothing with it". While this is nothing new, Watson's improving effectiveness at communicating what it's learning back to a user in the form of "chat" is now becoming an increasingly viable frontline tool.

Quaker has a new robot chef and her name is Alexa. The 135-year-old maker of oats is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to help consumers make an oatmeal method as old as Quaker itself: overnight oats. Working with agency partner Organic, Quaker has built its first ever app for Amazon's virtual assistant, which is available through products like the Echo speaker. The app, which debuted on Sunday at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, helps users find and make recipes for overnight oats, a trend that came as a bit of a surprise to the household brand that arguably knows oatmeal better than anyone. The idea for the app began a few months ago, after Quaker's social media team noticed there was a resurgence of an age-old tradition of cooking oats the night before and then letting them cool in the refrigerator overnight to be eaten cold the next morning.

You probably don't realize it, but if you use Facebook, you're working with artificial intelligence every day. The social network is able to recognize patterns in how you interact with things and deliver content in response. If you often "like" updates from a certain person, Facebook might suggest different (sometimes weird) ways for you to see more from that person. Mark Zuckerberg put all of this in plain speak during a town hall in Berlin, Germany, Thursday. "So much of what you do on Facebook -- you open up your app, you open up your News Feed, and there are thousands of things that are going on in your world, and we need to figure out what's interesting," Zuckerberg said.

TECH ENTREPRENEUR Elon Musk has been warning that the Age of the Robots is coming soon -- and it might not be pleasant for us. He may be right and he may be wrong on that, but one thing is sure: One robot certainly gave the anti-Whites a headache just this week. On Wednesday, tech giant Microsoft, the third largest corporation on Earth in terms of market value, launched and then immediately withdrew an Artificial Intelligence robot in the persona of a 19-year-old American girl called "Tay." Tay was a "chatbot," which interacted with real humans on the social media platform Twitter and was designed to learn from its interactions. Tay learned so fast that Microsoft pulled her offline in less than a single day.

SAN FRANCISCO • The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence (AI) programme over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement - not so much to professional game players as to Google's competitors. Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for AI. In the industry's lingo, they are engaged in a "platform war". A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow.