Can Donald Trump make artificial intelligence "great again?" A new Twitterbot is analyzing the way Mr. Trump speaks and using the data to generate tweets. The end result is intended to be an autonomous program capable of crafting tweets that sound like Mr. Trump and it has already garnered thousands of fans. "Much of my actual robotics research deals with these types of modeling techniques," Mr. Hayes said in a MIT article about the project. "I thought this would be a good way to learn more about some of the concepts, and have a little bit of fun in the process."

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." When it comes to political speeches, great ones are few and far between. But ordinary political speeches, those given in U.S. congressional floor debates, for example, are numerous. They are also remarkably similar. These speeches tend to follow a standard format, repeat similar arguments, and even use the same phrases to indicate a particular political affiliation or opinion. It's almost as if there is some kind of algorithm that determines their content.

When Donald Trump opens his mouth, the output can seem like the work of a demented Markov chain, a poorly trained algorithm trying its hand at rhetoric. Key words--"great again," "let me tell you," "we don't win anymore"--end up strung together by exceptionally weak ligaments. His syntax seems generated on the fly, word to word, each stumbling straight into the next, bound by the barest loyalty to grammar. As only he could, Trump's brought the state of political speech down to the state of the art of machine speechwriting. This past winter, a graduate student at the Technical University of Denmark earned significant attention for the politicians he was crafting in Python.

Microsoft today announced that it is making it easier for developers to use its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) to build their own deep learning applications. The company first open sourced this toolkit in April 2015, but at the time, it was hosted on Microsoft's own CodePlex site and was only available under a restrictive academic license. Now, the team is moving the project to GitHub and to the MIT open source license. CNTK is an open-source deep-learning toolkit that became available back in April 2015. However, when it was still on CodePlex, it was restricted by an academic license, which means that it was virtually unused beyond scholarly use.