Getting a jump on the parade of announcements to come at this week's CES tech trade show in Las Vegas, the graphics and AI chip company Nvidia gave an unofficial virtual keynote presentation Tuesday morning, unveiling updates to its gaming, robotics, and auto businesses. Nvidia (ticker: NVDA) had a rough 2022, with its stock losing about half of its value. The company was hurt by a combination of a slowing PC gaming market, a sharp plunge in purchases of graphics chips by cryptocurrency miners, and softening sales of chips for data centers, in particular in China, where tougher export restrictions hurt the business. But the company remains a Wall Street favorite, viewed as a leader in the market for chips used in both graphics and AI applications. Nvidia focused in particular on the use of artificial intelligence software across its product lines.

One of the great challenges in knowledge management has always been getting the right knowledge to front line workers in real time. Old-style knowledge repositories are simply too difficult to search through when a customer is waiting for an answer. I've been poking around the area of managing customer support knowledge for over two decades, and it's always been challenging--not only to get the knowledge out to the front lines, but also to get it into a system in a relatively straightforward fashion. If AI could solve this problem, it could help a lot of companies. So I was excited when I started hearing about Talla a couple of years ago--first from Rudina Seseri at Glasswing Ventures, who has funded Talla and where I'm an advisor--and then from Rob May himself, the CEO of Talla.

Talla has launched version 2.0 of the Talla Intelligent Knowledge Base -- a platform that brings together customer content with automation, chatbots, and machine learning to help customer facing teams move deals through the pipeline faster, decrease churn, and improve customer conversations. This new platform harnesses techniques in natural language processing and AI powered automation to achieve significant benefits for revenue generating teams within companies. Rob May, Founder and CEO Talla said: "Businesses today are driven by information, but the way that information is written makes it difficult to access simple crisp answers for customers. Talla uses AI to solve that problem. Our A.I. doesn't just analyze content -- it builds a knowledge graph to really understand it. With Talla, you can turn any section or any page of your knowledge base into a chatbot, then deploy that to arm your customer-facing employees with the information needed to generate results. And when your information contains actions, we can automate those actions as well, saving you significant amounts of time while simultaneously improving the customer experience."

It may be the stuff of science fiction, but even some of the most respected minds in science and technology are scared that artificial intelligence might wipe out humanity. However, while virtually every lab involved in designing AI has launched its own ethics group in a bid to play down fears, a more secure defence against social ills may come from the blockchain. A prime example of how the blockchain will work in this regard comes from Talla. Founded in Boston in 2015, Talla started its career by offering AI-based enterprise tools to businesses, yet at the end of last year it announced an ethereum-based blockchain for artificial intelligences. Dubbed the BotChain and currently undergoing beta testing, it works by issuing digital certificates for every action an AI takes and by linking these certificates into – unsurprisingly enough – a chain of encrypted documents. By doing this, it enables companies to monitor the activities of the autonomous bots they're using and ensure that legal and ethical standards are being upheld.

Are chatbots your next big data vulnerability? Yes, chatbots, those little add-ons to Slack and other messaging apps that answer basic HR questions, conduct company-wide polls, or get information from customers before connecting them to a person, pose a security risk. Because of the way we buy bots, Rob May, CEO of chatbot vendor Talla, says the IT industry is heading toward a data security crisis. "In the early days of SaaS [software as a service]," he explains, software "was sold as, 'Hey, marketing department, guess what? IT doesn't have to sign off, you just need a web browser,' and IT thought that was fine until one day your whole company was SaaS."

Open source has revolutionized and democratized the software in a big way. Hardware world, though, has remained resolutely insulated from opening up. Nvidia, world's leading graphics chip maker, is set to change that status quo. It recently made a revolutionary move that's sure to shake things up help shape the hardware chips industry. Nvidia has gone ahead with open sourcing the design of one of its AI chips designed to power deep learning.

Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL 0.86% Nest Labs in September announced a doorbell equipped with a Qualcomm Inc. QCOM 0.27% chip, a video camera and facial-recognition software that can send an alert to a Nest mobile app if it sees a familiar face. The market for computer-vision systems is nascent, poised to expand from roughly $1 billion last year to $2.6 billion in 2021, according to International Data Corp. Emerging products such as autonomous vehicles and personal robots portend continuing growth, and Intel Corp. INTC 0.25%, Qualcomm and other chip makers are jockeying to supply the brains to new machines. "These [applications] are edging into viability," said IDC analyst Michael Palma. "Maybe not mass viability, but very, very close."

Five years ago, Nvidia was best known as a maker of chips to power videogame graphics in PCs. Then researchers found its graphics chips were also good at powering deep learning, the software technique behind recent enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. The discovery made Nvidia into the preferred seller of shovels for the AI gold rush that's propelling dreams of self-driving cars, delivery drones and software that plays doctor. The company's stock-market value has risen 10-fold in three years, to more than $100 billion. That's made Nvidia and the market it more-or-less stumbled into an attractive target.

Five years ago, Nvidia was best known as a maker of chips to power videogame graphics in PCs. Then researchers found its graphics chips were also good at powering deep learning, the software technique behind recent enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. The discovery made Nvidia into the preferred seller of shovels for the AI gold rush that's propelling dreams of self-driving cars, delivery drones and software that plays doctor. The company's stock-market value has risen 10-fold in three years, to more than $100 billion. That's made Nvidia and the market it more-or-less stumbled into an attractive target.