You want a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform? No problem--you just need to choose one. But don't stop now: There are hundreds of options (from Kore.ai to SAP to Cisco's MindMeld to etc. etc.). Rasa's approach just might stand out. "We think that infrastructure for conversational interfaces in the long run will be open source," said Tyler Dunn, a product manager at Rasa.

Image recognition, determining all the objects within a photo, is something Facebook's AI does with relative ease. The company's approach to machine learning is called deep learning, a popular route to AI also followed by Google and others. Deep learning employs algorithms to recognize patterns, learn from those patterns and complete sophisticated tasks. For Facebook, it could be tagging friends. For Google, it may be creating a program that plays the game Go well enough to beat human champions.