Google says it will no longer build custom artificial intelligence tools for speeding up oil and gas extraction, separating itself from cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon.

 Alibaba Group Holding Ltd will invest 10bn yuan ($1.41bn) into an AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things) system centered around its Tmall Genie smart speaker, the company announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes as the e-commerce giant continues its push into new technologies and business sectors beyond online shopping.

Researchers have taken inspiration from a mosquito's ability to fly and land in the dark to develop a new collision-avoidance sensory system that has been tested on a quadcopter. The international team of scientists, led by Professor Richard Bomphrey at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London, looked at the sensory mechanism in the male Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito and found a way to mimic the insect's ability to use airflow to detect obstacles.

Various European supercomputers were shut down to give way to investigations after they were infected by cryptocurrency mining malware last week. A ZDNet report said the malware aims to mine Monero virtual currency (XMR).

China’s foreign ministry said on Saturday the United States needed to stop the “unreasonable suppression” of Chinese companies like Huawei.

OpenAI, an independent research organisation aimed at developing “friendly AI,” has been cranking out a lot of impressive work over the past few months. The organisation, for example, recently provided the source code for the language generating tool, Talk to Transformer. Now, OpenAI is adding to its repertoire of AI tools, Jukebox: An AI that generates raw audio of genre-specific songs.

Researchers from Intel Labs and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Medicine) are cooperating to create a new Artificial Intelligence or AI model that can spot brain tumors after the success of AIs in spotting skin cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer.

Google has added a very useful feature to Google Lens, its multipurpose object recognition tool. You can now copy and paste handwritten notes from your phone to your computer with Lens, though there is a catch - it only works if your handwriting is neat enough.

In a world suddenly fearful of touch, voice technology is getting a fresh look. Voice-activated systems such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri have seen strong growth in recent years, and the virus pandemic could accelerate that, analysts say.

Microsoft Corp. announced on Friday it would create its first datacentre region in Italy under a $1.5bn investment plan, as the US company expands its cloud computing services to more locations across the world.