Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company's respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era. Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged.

China should regulate the use of artificial intelligence to curb risks posed by the growing use of the technology, a senior government official said Friday. Protecting national security as well as users' interests and privacy should remain paramount as the adoption of AI rises, said Zhao Zeliang, deputy director of Cyberspace Administration of China, the internet industry overseer.

The Turing Award has recognized some of the biggest names in AI and computing over the years, and the latest winners are particularly heavy hitters. The three prize recipients for 2018 are Google VP Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook's Yann LeCun (above) and Yoshua Bengio, the Scientific Director of the giant AI research center Mila. All three helped "develop conceptual foundations" for deep neural networks, according to the Association for Computing Machinery, and created breakthroughs that showed he "practical advantages" of the technology. Hinton, for instance, proved that a then-rare backpropagation algorithm could help neural networks solve problems that were previously unfeasible. LeCun was instrumental to developing technologies behind modern computer vision, while Bengio helped foster generative adversarial networks (that is, pitting a creative network against another that serves as a kind of quality control) that can create original images.

I've been following IBM's AI efforts with interest for a quite a while now. In my opinion, the company jump-started the current cycle of AI with the introduction of Watson back in the 2000s and has steadily been ramping up its efforts since then. Most recently, I wrote about the launch of PowerAI, IBM's software toolkit solution to use with OpenPOWER systems for enterprises who don't want to develop their AI solutions entirely from scratch but still want to be able to customize to fit their specific deep learning needs. Today, IBM Research announced a new breakthrough that will only serve to further enhance PowerAI and its other AI offerings--a groundbreaking Distributed Deep Learning (DDL) software, which is one of the biggest announcements I've tracked in this space for the past six months. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that deep learning has really taken off in the last several years.

At the its Enterprise World 2017 in Toronto today, OpenText announced the rollout of Magellan – the Canadian enterprise information management software company's brand new artificial intelligence platform. And OpenText is not keeping it a secret that it has its eyes set on the market share help by top AI players. "OpenText Magellan is going head-to-head with the likes of IBM's Watson and SAP Leonardo," declared Adam Howatson, chief marketing officer of OpenText. But unlike many AI players, OpenText is taking a different route with Magellan. We're using Apache Spark and Lift," Howatson told IT in Canada.