AI is the de facto gold rush at the moment. Venture capitalists say AI startups in Thailand are in the initial stage of the AI journey. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest buzzwords in the startup scene, with AI companies attracting 15-50% more money in funding rounds. Even larger corporations, many not even tech companies, must still pay lip service and claim to use AI or risk looking like they are unprepared for an AI-driven future. But how much of this so-called AI technology is actually of any value and not just empty buzzwords?

Microsoft has surprised no-one by taking part in the AI frenzy currently sweeping the tech industry at its Build conference this week. Multiple projects were shown off; here are some of the most important. First out of the blocks is Redmond's work and a limited beta of squashing Cortana and Alexa together to allow the two virtual assistants to chat together. Talking of talking to AI, Microsoft highlighted an overhaul of its conversational AI bots, which should make it easier for developers to get such smart collections of code up and running on the firm's Azure cloud platform or their own servers, with more options for customisation and integration. For example, a new project dubbed Project Conversation Learner will let developers feed conversations into the bot framework, while Redmond's machine learning tech figures out new dialogue sequenced on top of them. On the topic of projects, Microsoft also showed off Brainwave, a deep learning neural network architecture that's designed, in theory, to make Azure the fastest cloud platform for running AI systems on.

Before the end of this year, Darktrace plans to release its Antigena technology. Antigena is designed to replicate the function of human antibodies, which identify and neutralise bacteria and viruses, by neutralising cyber threats automatically without human intervention. Darktrace is researching how information security teams respond to situations with a view to enabling the system not only to learn what they do, but also to predict what they will do and then use that information to offer better support information. "This is the kind of thing that really interests us, and is the kind of envelope-pushing, self-learning, machine-learning, AI-type stuff that we really want to get into," said Palmer. "An entirely AI security operations centre is not an unreasonable objective for us to have as researchers, and is certainly one of our goals, especially considering how quickly technology is moving in areas such as self-driving cars, which not long ago were considered to be pure fiction."