Deep in the heart of the CES expo floor, an unexpected Hollywoood actor - a face that most people would recognize - is fielding questions from the crowd. Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling jokes; he's answering questions like'what is the biggest country in the world?' and'how do you feel about humans? The star-studded Q&A session and friendly conversations aren't a paid endorsement or part of CES programming, but rather a new product by the flashy Russian robotics startup, Promobot, called'Android Robo-C.' While this isn't Promobot's first time at CES, it's the debut for Robo-C, which is being positioned as a kind of anthropomorphic office assistant that can handle customer queries and hook up to a smart home to help people interface with other gadgets.

A bolt from the maybe-future struck the technology community in late September. A paper by Google computer scientists appeared on a NASA website, claiming that an innovative new machine called a quantum computer had demonstrated "quantum supremacy." Transfer learning, or a technique that entails pretraining an AI model on a data-rich task before fine-tuning it on another task, has been successfully applied in domains from robotics to object classification. Unilever has claimed it is saving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by replacing human recruiters with an artificial intelligence system, amid warnings of a populist backlash against the spread of machine learning. Facebook remains embroiled in a multibillion-dollar judgement lawsuit over its facial recognition practices, but that hasn't stopped its artificial intelligence research division from developing technology to combat the very misdeeds of which the company is accused.

A Russian startup has created a new line of androids it hopes to sell to businesses with heavy customer service needs, like airports, banks, and museums. Built by Promobot, a Russian tech company operating out of a Warminister, Pennsylvania, Robo-C is the'world's first humanoid android, which not only simulates the appearance of a person, but also is able to integrate into business processes.' Robo-C was designed to be able to copy human facial expressions and can move its eyes, eyebrows, lips and other facial muscles, via 16 moving parts, and can adopt 600 different facial expressions. The robot can also speak directly to users and comes with an AI containing 100,000 speech modules, according to a report from CNBC. Robo-C is targeted for a number of different commercial uses, including work as a home companion.