Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has identified machine learning as the firm's key focus as cloud computing usage becomes more widespread. It is an area that is fast becoming the battleground for the big cloud providers. Google and Amazon Web Services both offer a range of tools that make it easier for developers to create "intelligent' applications, while the likes of Salesforce are keen to incorporate artificial intelligence into their software services. Speaking at an event in London's Canary Wharf financial district, Nadella's sales pitch placed emphasis on the role of machine learning across Microsoft's range of cloud products - from infrastructure and platform as a service offering in Azure, to its Dynamics and Office365 cloud software. First he highlighted how Azure Iaas will support "the next generation of applications." He said: "Whenever you think about the infrastructure layer in computing, you are always driven by the applications of the future: what are developers writing, not just today, but what is going to be the core currency of the applications of the future?" "It is going to be data and more importantly the ability to reason over data to create intelligence," he explained. "That is what is unique about the applications that are getting created today." "It is going to be data and more importantly the ability to reason over data to create intelligence," he explained. "That is what is unique about the applications that are getting created today." "And so we are building out our infrastructure to support that, to empower every developer to be able to infuse intelligence into everything that they are doing." Nadella added that its infrastructure is being supported by GPUs which are "tuned" to support machine learning workloads such as deep neural networks He added: "Every compute node of Azure actually has FPGAs - field programmable gate arrays - that means you can distribute your AI workloads to run at the speed of silicon." Nadella said that its platform as service offerings centre around the machine learning capabilities of its Cortana Intelligence system, as well as its Bot Framework. "We are building out Cortana, but [developers] have the same capability in terms of language understanding, dialogue understanding, 'conversations as a platform' capabilities allowing you to build agents, whether it is for customer service or for selling, or any need you may imagine as a developer.

Eventually some level of artificial intelligence will be integrated into every product and service we use. And to realize this potential, we need to be smart in defining the principles and goals that will guide this coming revolution. As a society, we have an ambivalent relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). While we love the benefits it offers, we are also afraid of it, because it represents the great unknown. So, newspapers are full of articles about computers beating people at chess or Go.

We had giant wireless phones in the beginning and from there we transitioned to everyone having a smartphone in the span of a few years. Social media seemed like a gimmick for the young generation at first, until everyone was on social media.Now Artificial Intelligence is slowly becoming commonplace, and soon we will be in a society governed through artificial intelligence.The research firm Gartner reaffirmed this when they highlighted Artificial Intelligence as the key strategic prediction of 2016. The rise of Artificial Intelligence is becoming a reality thanks to the developments in computer sciences and neurology. Companies like Google are trying to emulate the way the human brain works in order to create intelligences that can pass the Turing test. Neural networks are being studied to learn how thought is created in the brain and what fuels creativity. An example of this is Google's Deep Dream projects, which is trying to emulate the way we recognise objects based on visual stimuli.