Microsoft's drawing AI understands natural language and can be creative...

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Based on the SQuAD test, Alibaba's AI was the first to reach super human performance in text comprehension with an score of 82.440 vs 82.304, passed one day after by Microsoft Research with an score of 82.650.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

How do AIs catch Elephants?

They send the Terminator back in time...

*duck*

Researchers were able to build ANNs, artificial neural networks, with mixed signal, neuromorphic chips based on memristors...

mixed-signal-neural-net-leverages-memristive-technology

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Shake it, we won't make it, UN Secretary-General issues Red Alert for the world in 2018...

Nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise, inequality is growing, climate change is accelerating and the world is seeing horrific violations of human rights, he said. Global anxieties about nuclear weapons were the highest since the Cold War.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Okay, this one affected me personally.

Google's Deepmind team adapted their AlphaZero approach for the games of  chess and shogi and dropped the bomb already on the 5th of December.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815

For chess they trained the Deep Neural Network for 4 to 9 hours on an  cluster with 5000+64 TPUs (1st+2nd gen) and reached super human level.

Unlike in Go, they did not compete with humans, cos chess engines are already on an super grandmaster like level, no, they did compete with the worlds strongest open source engine - Stockfish, result:

100 game match with 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses for AlphaZero.

This is definitely a smack in the face for all computer chess programmers out there. Next stop Neanderthal Man.

So, with thanks to the Krampus,
+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

...the Singularity to take off.

China wants to pass US in AI by 2030...

eric-schmidt-and-bob-work-our-ai-sputnik-moment-is-now

china-challenges-nvidias-hold-on-artificial-intelligence-chips

And Banksters are investing again in good old silicon...

the-race-to-power-ais-silicon-brains

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Ohoh, another warning from our beloved scientists concerning our impaired ecosphere.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Flippy from Miso Robotics is able to roast hamburgers, twice as many burgers per hour as an human does, and this is just the beginning of the kitchen conquer they say...

+1 points for the Singularity to take off ;-)

"Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of this century," Petteri Taalas, the WMO's secretary-general, said in a statement.

If we are too busy with an collapsing biospehre, we may have not enough resources for the Singularity.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.