In a few weeks, the year 2016 will officially and finally be over. So before the year ends, let's evaluate what technology has been in the year 2016, especially in terms of AI and machine learning advances. Here is the list for the most notable AI advances in 2016.

AI won the Go championship

The first notable AI advancement of this year is perhaps DeepMind playing against world Go champion player Lee Sedol in a Go battle. The AI beat the human champion four times out of five games. What made this win remarkable was that Go is considered the most complex game in the world because its move consist of a lot of probabilities. DeepMind, however, was able to learn these moves by studying countless Go games.

AI predicted the Kentucky Derby winners

Another remarkable display in AI advancement was when Swarm was able to predict the four top horses in the Kentucky Derby accurately in order. Swarm technology is a real-time online tool which gathers the decisions of people and sorts them through an algorithm to arrive at one decision. The Swarm AI was able to predict the winners beating the experts.

AI saved a man's life

Tesla's autopilot saved a man's life by driving him to the hospital. Joshua Neally was driving when he felt some constricting chest pains while driving on a highway on Springfield, Missouri. He engaged his car in autopilot and helped him navigate most of the way to the hospital.

AI can understand human speech much better

Microsoft's speech recognition AI was pitted against the best professional transcribers and given the same sound file. The artificial intelligence had less mistake than its human counterpart.

AI predicted the US election winner

An Indian startup company MogIA predicted that Trump will win the election by sorting through 20 million social data points and analyzed the sentiments of the people.