Microsoft has developed an artificial intelligence-based technology that's capable of answering questions just like humans. The Redmond giant has also revealed that it is planning to expand the technology, so that it would be skilled enough to handle follow-up questions as well. In a recent blog post, Microsoft talked about a new technology it has created that is utilizing AI to read documents and respond to queries about such documents the way humans would. The tech company is crediting a research team at Microsoft Research Asia for developing such advanced AI. So just how human-like is Microsoft's new AI? The company proudly shared that the model it submitted reached the score of 82.650 on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) leaderboard.

French video game giant Ubisoft has recorded strong revenue in the recent past, thanks to a stable of consistent hits like Rainbow Six: Siege, Ghost Recon: Wildlands and the Assassin's Creed franchise. Even the oddball crossover Mario Rabbids: Kingdom Battle for Nintendo Switch found success earlier this year. But Ubisoft's steady run of success has not saved the company from talk of a possible hostile takeover by fellow French media corporation Vivendi. The good news for Ubisoft: It does not seem like a takeover will happen in the immediate future. Vivendi said it will not attempt a takeover in the next six months.

You can say this for Diffbot: It's not shying away from a big challenge. The San Francisco startup, which just closed $10 million in Series A investment, wants to scrape all the data on the web (all of it) to put it into a structured format, which thus makes it useful for all sorts of business purposes. And perhaps more to the point, the five-year-old company became profitable last year, according to founder and chief executive Mike Tung. Of course that isn't really verifiable from the outside, but it's worth noting especially as far larger companies are struggling to find a good business model for AI or cognitive computing or whatever the next name for this self-teaching technology will be. The company claims big customers including Amazon (amzn), DuckDuckGo, and Salesforce (crm) which uses the service in its Radian6 "social listening" business.

Tesla Motors Inc.'s Autopilot has been in the news a lot of late, and not only because of the vehicles crashes involving (or not) the self-driving system or updates to it that would have prevented at least some of those crashes. On Wednesday, Tesla's erstwhile partner in its Autopilot development, Israeli chipmaker Mobileye, said it had decided to split with the Elon Musk-owned company because of concerns over Autopilot, with Tesla "pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Speaking to Reuters, Mobileye Chairman Amnon Shashua said of Autopilot: "It is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system." In response, a Tesla spokeswoman had initially said the company never advertised its Autopilot as a self-driving technology or its cars as autonomous vehicles.

A 53-year-old man died Wednesday after his Tesla Model S crashed into a tree and burst into flames on a highway about 25 miles south of Amsterdam. Technical personnel from the company joined Dutch investigators at the scene "to establish the facts of the incident," including to confirm whether the car's Autopilot feature was engaged at the time. A Tesla spokesperson reportedly said: "We are undertaking a full investigation and will share our findings as soon as possible." While there has been no other official public statement from the company so far, Dana Hull, a reporter for Bloomberg, said on her Twitter page that Tesla confirmed the car's self-driving feature "was not engaged at any time." Updated from @TeslaMotors: "Thus far, we can confirm from the car's logs that Autopilot was not engaged at any time" https://t.co/RKEX3zkEB1 The cause of the accident in the Netherlands is still not known.