If you believe the CEOs, a fully autonomous car could be only months away. In 2015, Elon Musk predicted a fully autonomous Tesla by 2018; so did Google. Delphi and MobileEye's Level 4 system is currently slated for 2019, the same year Nutonomy plans to deploy thousands of driverless taxis on the streets of Singapore. GM will put a fully autonomous car into production in 2019, with no steering wheel or ability for drivers to intervene. There's real money behind these predictions, bets made on the assumption that the software will be able to catch up to the hype.

There are 1,070 artificial intelligence companies in Beijing, accounting for 26% of the total number in China, according to the AI Development White Paper published by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, The Paper reported. As of May 8, the number of AI enterprises in China hit 4,040, while those with venture capital reached 1,237 -- 35% of them based in Beijing. Zhong Guan Cun, the technology hub in Beijing, has become the AI innovation highland of the country. But more than half of Beijing's AI firms are still in the initial stage. At least 29% of them are in A-round, followed by 6.7% in Pre-A round. About 18.5% and 2.7% have received funding from angel investors and seed investors, respectively.

As soon as you're diagnosed as diabetic, ads for treatments show up on social feeds. You get alerts on health supplements, maybe nutrition tips. Prompts on insurance policies pop up on your phone. It's a manifestation of the trove of data harnessed by WeDoctor, one of China's most richly valued online health outfits, in an ambitious quest to upend the business of personal care. The ads may not be conspicuous – they can be buried within a pitch about chronic diseases – but the target is uncannily precise: you.

When a man in the Middle East appears to be performing miracles, a rift breaks out over whether he's the Messiah or a fraud in this suspenseful drama.

Earlier this year Microsoft announced that it was introducing AI in its ubiquitous spreadsheet application Excel. Specifically what it said it would do -- the features are still in beta -- is add new AI-powered data types that will allow users to access deeper and more extensive information about a company or a place by pulling the information from the Microsoft Knowledge Group. "It recognizes, in context, what is meant by your text and converts that to the right type of data," Microsoft writes in a post. It's not just states or countries or companies either -- the new feature supports zip codes, cities, and other types of financial data like stocks and index funds, Microsoft noted. What's more Microsoft wrote, "as you try this feature, you may notice the intelligent conversions sometimes aren't sure what to convert to. In those cases, Excel will ask you to specify which data type should be returned from the service. For example, the city Portland works fine when it's a list of other cities that are nearby, but when it's in a blank grid, with no other textual context, then Excel will ask you which Portland you meant."

Michio Kaku: People often ask me the question, "In the era of AI what jobs and what skills will I need?" Well, first of all let's take a look at the first era of space exploration the 1960s. There was a crash program back then to miniaturize the transistor. The Russian astronauts, they're also very tiny because they have to fit inside the nose cone of a missile, and we scientists were given the mission to miniaturize transistors as far as possible. Now, as a consequence of that, we have what is called the Internet age today.

Baidu marked volume production of Apolong autonomous buses, developed with Chinese busmaker King Long and using Apollo autonomous driving software, for commercial operation in cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan, the company said at its developer conference in Beijing on July 4, 2018. Intel is getting a big opportunity to show off advanced vision technology and software from its Mobileye unit by partnering with Baidu's Apollo, the Chinese tech giant's autonomous driving consortium. Working with Mobileye, Baidu will integrate the Israeli company's Responsibility Sensitive Safety software into both its open-source Apollo platform shared with partner companies and commercial Apollo Pilot programs, Intel said in a statement. Baidu will also use Mobileye's camera-based surround computer vision system for automated vehicles being developed for the Chinese market. "Our team recognizes the value and critical role that Mobileye's RSS model plays in safely deploying autonomous driving," Weihao Gu, general manager of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Unit, said in a statement.

You can try Amazon's Echo Look if you want AI to offer fashion advice at home. But what if you're at the store, and would rather not hem and haw while you decide if that top goes with those jeans? Guess and Alibaba think they can help. They've worked together on an AI system, FashionAI, that uses computer vision to help you create an entire outfit while you're shopping. A smart mirror can recognize the color, style and traits of what you're holding (such as the neckline) and suggest other items that would be a good complement, including clothes you've already bought online.

The financial services industry is feeling the impact of the digital revolution. Maintaining growth and profitability is an enormous challenge for banks as they need to keep tinkering with the customer experience, not only to provide financial services for their customers, but also to stay more relevant in customer's lives and keep their attention. Digital platforms are fueling the on-demand economy by matching supply and demand in an accessible, low-cost way. Uber, Amazon, and Alibaba show the disruptive power of these "share" technology platforms, where buyer-seller interaction is high, a diverse range of goods are on offer, and the marginal cost of rolling out a new product or service is approaching zero. Fintechs are disrupting the industry by both cooperating and competing with banks for customer attention and thus their wallets.

Today's blog post is a Q&A session with top fintech influencer and founder of Unconventional Ventures, Theodora Lau. Named one of 44 "2017 Innovators to Watch" by Bank Innovation, ranked No. 2 Top FinTech Influencers 2018 by Onalytica, and named to the list of LinkedIn Top Voices 2017 for Economy and Finance, she's a powerful voice in the industry. If you probe into the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives in the enterprise, it quickly becomes clear what's behind it: big data. In a 2018 NewVantage Partners survey of Fortune 1000 executives, 76.5 percent cite the greater proliferation and availability of data is making AI possible. As Randy Bean in an MITSloan Management Review article puts it, "For the first time, large corporations report that they have direct access to meaningful volumes and sources of data that can feed AI algorithms to detect patterns and understand behaviors….these