Lawyers-turned-techies Joe Tiano, Alison Grounds and Ed Walters shared how law firms and their clients are responding to fast-developing AI applications at a GSU Law symposium--raising the question of lawyers' ethical duty to use them.

Sometimes a shift in power happens so subtly that you don't even notice it is occurring. Take the increasingly important field of artificial intelligence. For all the talk of autonomous vehicles and smart home appliances in Silicon Valley, some of the most innovative work in artificial intelligence is being done far away, in China. Beijing is supporting A.I. research with vast sums of money and is helping to move those innovations into China's private sector, Paul Mozur and John Markoff write. And China is spending more just as the United States appears to be ready to pull back on such investing.

Once again, artificial intelligence triumphed over man. In the second match of a three-game series on Thursday, Google's DeepMind AlphaGo program beat the 19-year-old Chinese prodigy Ke Jie in the strategy board game Go. AlphaGo won the first game earlier in the week; the final game is scheduled for Saturday. The daily Bits newsletter will keep you updated on the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry, plus exclusive analysis from our reporters and editors. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Last year, a Google computer program known as DeepMind's AlphaGo beat one of the world's top players in the game of Go, a two-player board game that originated in China more than 2,000 years earlier. The event made headlines the world over, including in The New York Times, as a sign of the increasing strength of artificial intelligence versus human brainpower. On Tuesday, AlphaGo was at it again. This time, the Google artificial intelligence program took on the top-ranked Chinese Go player, Ke Jie, in Wuzhen, China, as part of a three-game match. AlphaGo was victorious in the first game, writes Paul Mozur, a New York Times technology reporter, causing Mr. Ke to call the program "like a god of Go."

Computers really are becoming like people: Just because they are smart doesn't mean they won't do awful things. As John Markoff writes, the kind of artificial intelligence that is capable of winning at the game of Go or figuring out your fastest route home is also starting to show up in criminal schemes. One program, known as Blackshades, was sold in the online criminal underground known as the dark web and used for purposes like video and audio eavesdropping. The man who developed Blackshades was sentenced in June 2015 to 57 months in prison. As with most other crimes, though, the threat of hard time isn't going to stop everyone -- particularly as the costs keep coming down and the number of applications is exploding.