We thank the reviewers for their feedback and time! We are encouraged they found our theoretical results "impressive" Large batchsizes help us to obtain complexity guarantees beating the state-of-the-art ones. We can add these details to the main body using an additional 9th page. We agree with this criticism. We will try to test our methods on this task and investigate the heavy-tailedness of stochastic gradients for this problem. Simsekli et al. focus on non-convex problems and rates of convergence in expectation .

Majikthise: By law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up all night saying there may… Majikthise: …or may not be, a God if this machine comes along next morning and gives you His telephone number? Vroomfondel: We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. I claim no special knowledge or insight into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or AI ethics.

So, let us get back to our main two core questions: How polite should a human being be with a voicebot, and how polite should a voicebot be with a human being? In my opinion, the answer to the first question is straightforward. The human being should be able to behave in any way that they wish to behave, with their only concern being to have the voicebot do what they want it to do and do it as quickly or as slowly as they want it to do it. If the human wishes to use "Please" and "Thank you" and other politeness markers, then the voicebot should accommodate such markers. If not, then the voicebot should accommodate their absence.

Most AI assistants can't really hold a conversation. They're fine with I-go-you-go dialogue, but most humans aren't quite so timid -- they know when to interrupt, and when to restart chat when there's an awkward pause. Microsoft wants to fix that. It just upgraded its Xiaolce chatbot AI with "full duplex" conversation that lets it start speaking when it's listening to what you're saying. As it can predict what you're likely to say next, it knows when to interrupt you with important info or say something more when both sides suddenly go quiet.

The computer engineer fired by Google for suggesting women are less suited to certain roles in tech and leadership is considering taking legal action against the company. James Damore, a chess master who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at the search engine's Mountain View HQ in California, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto at the weekend complaining about Google's "ideological echo chamber" and claiming women have lower tolerance of stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. He was fired on Monday after the search giant's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore's 10-page memo "violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes". Damore has now said he would "likely be pursuing legal action". "I have a right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behaviour, which is what my document does," he said in an email reported by the New York Times. In a further email to the rightwing website Breitbart, he reportedly said: "They just fired me for'perpetuating gender stereotypes'."

Google has revealed that its self-driving cars don't just know how to change lanes and run yellow lights -- now, they can even honk the horn like a regular human. As the company's test cars trundle around on public roads, Google has begun training its computers to rely on the horn in specific scenarios, such as when another driver is backing out of a space and can't see that Google's vehicle is approaching. At other times, it'll honk when another driver starts edging into the occupied lane. The company is only just beginning to roll out this feature after testing the horn inside the car itself; engineers didn't want the vehicle to blast away at other people unnecessarily or by mistake. So when the car accidentally honked at someone during testing, only the Googlers on the inside could hear it and correct for it by teaching the computer that that wasn't an appropriate time to honk.