I take quarterly weekend trips to China to stay in the loop of the tech scene there. It's substantially different every time I visit. My last trip was in Q4, 2016. Thanks to Kai-Fu's invitation, I had the pleasure to visit the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, and it was one of the best trips I've had. Needless to say, everything was confidential on that trip so I can't really talk about it.

Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the tech industry, and China's most popular Netflix-like video streaming service iQiyi is sparing no effort to secure its leading position in the industry by applying AI technology to its service. Tang Xing, iQiyi's chief technology officer, announced last week at the iQiyi Technology & Entertainment World Conference in Beijing that the entertainment company is setting up an innovation lab to develop AI technology. He stressed that the company's AI strategies include improving user experience and optimizing commercialization. "A massive amount of content, large user base, and strong cloud computing power have made the online video industry enter the AI entertainment era at a faster pace," said Tang. He said that iQiyi has developed multiple AI-driven applications based on technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), and pattern and image recognition.

After years toiling away in secret on a car project, Apple chief executive Tim Cook has for the first time elaborated on the company's plans in the automotive market. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Mr Cook said in a 5 June interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple's automotive plans. "It's a core technology that we view as very important." He likened the effort to "the mother of all AI projects," saying it's "probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on". The prospect of self-driving cars has seen a slew of technology companies push into the auto industry, according to McKinsey & Co. Alphabet's Waymo unit has signed partnerships with Fiat Chrysler and Lyft to develop the technology.

AI is no longer just hype. It has moved beyond the research labs of tech majors Facebook, Microsoft, Google and its ilk to consumer product companies that are seeing significant results in consumer engagement, sales, profitability and productivity. Consumer AI manifests in two ways – a) understanding customer behavior/improving customer experience (CX); b) harnessing data to improve product. According to a SAP whitepaper, early adopters of consumer AI saw big gains. Case in point, eBay, a SAP customer teamed up to analyze over 500 metrics and sift through 50 petabytes of data to separate market signals from noise.

For anyone who's getting their first introduction to Einstein AI features, now rapidly being deployed in the Salesforce platform, two questions may arise. Why is this different from past cycles of AI excitement and disappointment? Why is an integrated layer of AI capability so crucial to a modern CRM? Six decades of research, development, and sci-fi hype have followed the first famous "Dartmouth memo" – which naïvely proposed "a 2 month, 10 man study" as being enough to make "a significant advance" in "how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves." The challenge was clearly much greater than first realized: most observers agree that people had vastly underestimated the portion of our intelligence that comes from what we know, rather than how cleverly we think. In laboratory settings and research universities, the focus was on making software smart.

Artificial Intelligence is simply a machine displaying the intelligence level of a human, at least for the specific domain it has been programmed for. One of the earliest precursors was Eliza, a chat program that had responses pre-programmed in. It would pick up words and/or phrases from sentences, and compare the words (or their synonyms) against its response database for an answer. Its responses appeared to be well-thought out, and surprisingly, it offered a human-like level of interaction. Artificial Intelligence has come a long way since then.

WASHINGTON – The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials have told Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities, and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds. An unreleased Pentagon report, viewed by Reuters, warns that China is skirting U.S. oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS reviews. Such deals would include joint ventures, minority stakes and early-stage investments in start-ups.

The effectiveness of machine learning models may vary between the test phase and their use "in the wild" on actual consumer data. Many research papers claim high rates of malware detection and false positives with machine learning, and often deep learning, models. However, nearly all of these rates are within the context of a single source of data, which authors use to train and test their models. Machine learning has become more advanced but isn't used enough yet in security, says Hillary Sanders, data scientist for Sophos' data science research group. She anticipates usage will increase in coming years to address the rise of different forms of malware.

A screen shows information on 5G during a keynote address by CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group Richard Yu at CES 2017 at The Venetian Las Vegas on January 5, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show, runs through January 8 and features 3,800 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to more than 165,000 attendees. Every product in today's social media-driven world is, in a sense, overhyped. But even taking that into consideration, consumer electronics probably take the cake for most shameless overpromising, and none more than the brouhaha surrounding AI and VR the past couple of years. Every commercial for VR headsets, whether it's by LG or Samsung or Sony, want you to believe that putting on the device is to step into a truly immersive experience, except no, the pixels are clearly visible, there's a bit of lag, and the headsets are not comfortable to wear more than 15 to 20 minutes at a time.

MUELHEIM-KAERLICH, GERMANY – As head of the Muelheim-Kaerlich nuclear reactor, Thomas Volmar spends his days plotting how to tear down his workplace. The best way to do that, he says, is to cut out humans. About 200 nuclear reactors around the world will be shut down over the next quarter century, mostly in Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. That means a lot of work for the half a dozen companies that specialize in the massively complex and dangerous job of dismantling plants. Those firms -- including Areva, Rosatom's Nukem Technologies Engineering Services, and Toshiba's Westinghouse -- are increasingly turning away from humans to do this work and instead deploying robots and other new technologies.