John Deere is announcing the acquisition of a state-of-the-art algorithm package from artificial intelligence startup Light. For those of you wondering when driverless vehicles will truly begin to make their mark on society, the answer is: today. Up front: No, you won't be seeing green tractors rolling themselves down city streets anytime soon. But the timeline for fully autonomous farming is being massively accelerated. Today's purchase is all about John Deere's need for speed -- and accuracy, but first let's talk about rapid development.

Future Apple smart speakers, like HomePod, might be much more data privacy focused. Apple has reportedly paid $200 million to acquire Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Xnor.ai, The purchase is one of many for Apple, which has become adept at vacuuming up tech startups, but it also gives us a glimpse into the company's thinking when it comes to future devices. Xnor.ai's work on hyper-efficient, low-power AI that doesn't require powerful processing or a connection to the cloud (processing locally on-device instead), neatly slots into a few areas Apple is currently working on. Whilst Apple hasn't - and doesn't typically - comment on why it acquires certain companies and how they fit into its future roadmap, we can speculate on how Xnor.ai's work fits in to the master plan.

Facebook might have another AI tool for its quest to tackle fake news. The social network has acquired Bloomsbury AI, a London firm specializing in using machine learning to understand natural language in documents. The move is ostensibly about improving "natural language processing research" and its uses, but TechCrunch sources had previously noted that Bloomsbury would tackle fake news and other content problems. There's some evidence to support this. Bloomsbury AI co-creator Sebastian Riedel had launched another startup, Factmata, that was designing anti-fake news tools.

The Montreal-based company is "one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding", according to Microsoft, and will help the tech giant pursue a monumental goal in AI, called artificial general intelligence (AGI). The idea behind AGI -- and Maluuba's main pursuit -- is to create "literate machines that can think, reason, and communicate like humans", Microsoft's executive vice president of artificial intelligence, Harry Shum, wrote in a blog post. The company is using natural language processing technology that helps machines understand what people are saying, what context they're asking it in, and what information they want in a response -- just as humans communicate.