An article in Newsweek magazine says, "Artificial intelligence will cure America's sick health care system" using data and automation to "drive down the costs of health care while increasing effectiveness." A company called Virta Health has come up with a smartphone app that is like "a live-in doctor and diabetes coach." The patient population consisted of 238 morbidly obese patients with type 2 diabetes; 90 percent were taking one or more diabetes medications, and 80 percent had hemoglobin A1c levels 6.5 percent. We are going to need a better study with randomized patients and a much longer follow-up period before we can say artificial intelligence is going to "cure America"s sick health care system."

Twitter thrives on its ability to understand both your tweets and the hot topic of the day, and it needs every bit of help it can get -- including from computers. Accordingly, the social network just snapped up Whetlab, a startup that makes it easier to implement machine learning (aka a form of artificial intelligence). The two companies are shy about what the acquisition means besides an improvement to Twitter's "internal machine learning efforts." However, the likely focus is on highlighting the content that's most relevant to you based on your activity and who you follow, as well as hiding abusive tweets before you have to reach for the "block" option. Whetlab's technology could get the ball rolling on these robotic discovery techniques much faster than before, and give you a custom-tailored Twitter experience that requires little effort on your part.