Dan Ammann, former president of the largest Detroit automaker and now the CEO of Cruise, wrote in a blog post that to "make order-of-magnitude -- rather than incremental -- improvements in transportation, we need to build alternatives that are superior to the status quo in every way." The post was headlined "We Need to Move Beyond the Car." Cruise's mission, he said, is to "reduce congestion through making shared rides more compelling by providing an awesome experience at a radically lower cost." Only then, "will we truly move beyond the car to the transportation system that we deserve." Ammann did not elaborate on Cruise's plans in his post.

This is a rare opportunity to work for a breakthrough company that is disrupting a $50B market. MongoDB is the fastest-growing database on the planet, and the MongoDB community is transforming industries with incredibly innovative applications. To help fuel and manage this growth, we are looking for someone to join our leading-edge talent acquisition team that moves quickly and stay focused but relish the opportunity to help build a company with immense potential. This is a critical and highly visible role in one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world where recruiting is a top priority of the company. You'll report to the Manager, Systems & Analytics and will be located in Gurgaon.

Apple has acquired a startup in the UK that develops technology designed to improve smartphone photography. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Spectral Edge for an undisclosed sum. Spectral Edge uses machine learning to "make smartphone pictures crisper, with more accurate colors." This works primarily by taking an infrared image and blending it with a standard photo. "Spectral Edge combines patented Image Fusion tech with Deep Learning to reveal more of the color, detail and clarity in any image," the company explained in its pitch.

At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco this week, France-based research institute CEA-Leti presented papers highlighting its achievements in bio-inspired neural networks, a readout technique for high-fidelity measurements in large quantum dot arrays and inorganic thin film batteries with optimum energy and power density performance for medical and implantable devices. This article presents highlights of each of these three papers. Bio-inspired neural networks have been in development for a while, and at IEDM, Leti announced it had fabricated a fully integrated bio-inspired neural network, combining resistive-RAM-based synapses and analog spiking neurons. The functionality of this proof-of-concept circuit was demonstrated thanks to handwritten digits classification. "The entire network is integrated on-chip," said Alexandre Valentian, lead author of the paper, Fully Integrated Spiking Neural Network with Analog Neurons and RRAM Synapses.

One of the biggest threats to privacy and national security is the ability of the immensely powerful quantum computers to break prevailing methods of encryption almost instantaneously. Once quantum computers become a reality, something that could conceivably happen in the next decade or two, all of the data protected by encrypted systems on the internet will become decrypted and unprotected, accessible to all individuals, organizations or nation-states. Dr. Jill Pipher, President of the American Mathematical Society, VP for Research, and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University led a briefing last week for lawmakers on Capitol Hill called "No Longer Secure: Cryptography in the Quantum Era" about the threats that quantum computing poses to existing cryptographic systems that support national and economic security. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) began the briefing by saying "we're acutely aware of the potential advantages and disadvantages that quantum presents. And we're also very concerned that some of our adversaries and competitors are investing a great deal in quantum computing."

For decades retail companies have been exploiting analytics within the different segments of their businesses, including marketing and operations. Such analytics are dusty, however, and have now come to an end. Traditional analytical methods are outdated; they require a lot of manual steps and the insights extracted cannot be easily generalized. Using analytics ultimately provides a low return if you include the amount of manpower needed allocating to run them. Machine learning (ML) can be viewed as an extension of analytics.

Sanofi, which has moved purposefully into high technologies to get more from its manufacturing, will lean heavily on that strategy to shrink costs and fatten margins. Using robotics, artificial intelligence and new generation manufacturing should save it half a billion euros in annual costs by 2022. So says Sanofi CFO Jean-Baptiste Chasseloup de Chatillon who was filling in some details of new CEO Paul Hudson's €2 billion cost-savings plan laid out Tuesday during Sanofi's investor conference. "It is a leapfrogging of productivity. It reduces cycle time," Chasseloup de Chatillon said on a webcast of the conference.

Future Life Conference is an opportunity to take a step beyond what you already know about the impact emerging technologies have on Australia's health system, education, job market, housing and climate. Imagine your children or grandchildren being born within the next 20 years. What will their life be like? What will their education look like with the support of emerging technologies? How will they find work when a lot of people fear of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence?

In his upcoming book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, which will hit bookshelves in late January 2020, Diamandis makes the case for why he believes big tech companies are going to be running healthcare by 2030. In December, he came to Fast Company's offices to make the case for why Big Tech is the doctor of the future. "We're going to see Apple and Amazon and Google and all the data-driven companies that are in our homes right now become our healthcare providers," he says, referring to smart speakers such as Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's HomePod. While many of these home voice assistants started with simple tasks like restocking home pantries and surfacing cooking tutorials, they're already starting to move into the business of managing family well-being. Amazon has put significant effort into making Alexa a health resource.

A warehouse in an industrial park about an hour's drive north of downtown Beijing offers a paradoxical picture of China's much-hyped, and increasingly controversial, artificial intelligence boom. Inside the building, a handful of squat cylindrical robots scuttle about, following an intricate and invisible pattern. Occasionally, one zips beneath a stack of shelves, raises it gently off the ground, then brings it to a station where a human worker can grab items for packing. A handful of engineers stare intently at code running on a bank of computers. The robots and the AI behind them were developed by Megvii, one of China's vaunted AI unicorns.