A new website lets users click through an endless library of fake human faces created by artificial intelligence. Called ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, the results are startlingly lifelike and may make you question what's real and what isn't. Every time a user refreshes their browser, the site spits out a randomly generated face, spanning from older men and women to even children. At first glance, these photos appear to be of random people. However, a website called ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate startlingly realistic copies of human faces ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com was created by a software engineer at Uber.

Last week, Amazon made the unexpected move of calling for regulation on facial recognition. In a blog post published on Thursday, Michael Punke, VP of global public policy at Amazon Web Services, expressed support for a "national legislative framework that protects individual civil rights and ensures that governments are transparent in their use of facial recognition technology." Facial recognition is one of the fastest-growing areas of the artificial intelligence industry. It has drawn interest from both the public and private sector and is already worth billions of dollars. Amazon has been moving fast to establish itself as a leader in facial recognition technology, actively marketing its Rekognition service to different customers, including law enforcement agencies.

The idea sounded good in theory: Rather than giving away full-boat scholarships, colleges could optimize their use of scholarship money to attract students willing to pay most of the tuition costs. So instead of offering a $20,000 scholarship to one needy student, they could divide the same amount into four scholarships of $5,000 each and dangle them in front to wealthier students who might otherwise choose a different school. Luring four paying students instead of one nonpayer would create $240,000 in additional tuition revenue over four years. The widely used practice, called "financial aid leveraging," is a perfect application of machine learning, the form of predictive analytics that has taken the business world by storm. But it turned out that the long-term unintended consequence of this leveraging is an imbalance in the student population between economic classes, with wealthier applicants gaining admission at the expense of poorer but equally qualified peers. Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, applies specialized algorithms to large data sets to discover factors that influence outcomes that might be invisible to humans because of the sheer quantity of data involved. Researchers are using machine learning to tackle a wide variety of tasks of unimaginable complexity, such as determining harmful drug interactions by correlating millions of patient medication records or identifying new factors that contribute to equipment failure in factories. Web-scale giants such as Facebook Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. have stoked the frenzy by releasing robust machine learning frameworks under open-source licenses.

With the help of artificial intelligence, you can manipulate video of public figures to say whatever you like -- or now, create images of people's faces that don't even exist. You can see this in action on a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com. It uses an algorithm to spit out a single image of a person's face, and for the most part, they look frighteningly real. Hit refresh in your browser, and the algorithm will generate a new face. Again, these people do not exist.

Episode Summary: One of the promises of artificial intelligence is aiding humans in making smarter decisions. Whether it's in pharma, retail, or eCommerce companies, the idea of being able to pool together streams of data and coax out the insights that would help make the best call for the organization to reach its goals is the promise of artificial intelligence. As it turns out that same dynamic is sort of happening in the public sector where AI is now being used to inform policy. Previously, she was Program Director at the National Science Foundation. PhD in computer science and she runs the Data Science Initiatives at URI.

Among the key factors driving the economic divide in America is the rise of technology that has eliminated many jobs through automating manufacturing tasks. A new report from the Brookings Institution warns that, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, economic disparity between coastal cities and heartland regions is about to get even worse. The 2016 Presidential election served as a wake-up call to the economic effect that the automation of many routine jobs is "massively rearranging the nation's economic geography," says the report, written by Brookings Senior Fellow Mark Muro. "The 2016 election may go down as the first time society began to grasp the full implications of automation's potential to transform the physical world," Muro wrote. "As big, techy cities like New York, Washington, and the Bay Area seemed to increasingly inhabit a different world from the rest of America, the people and places that were'left behind' revolted."

Major technologies like AI, cloud computing, big data, robotics, blockchain had drawn the attention of the private sector. To make the business more productive and increase the efficiency these technologies took a major part. At present, the government is trying to implement many AI applications and many are in progress right now. The best example of AI in smartphones is Siri but there are more applications other than that.AI will help the machines to learn by themselves and make a smart decision just like humans. All the time consuming and repetitive tasks are taken away by AI.

Amgen's drug discovery group is a few blocks beyond that. Until recently, Barzilay, one of the world's leading researchers in artificial intelligence, hadn't given much thought to these nearby buildings full of chemists and biologists. But as AI and machine learning began to perform ever more impressive feats in image recognition and language comprehension, she began to wonder: could it also transform the task of finding new drugs? The problem is that human researchers can explore only a tiny slice of what is possible. It's estimated that there are as many as 1060 potentially drug-like molecules--more than the number of atoms in the solar system. But traversing seemingly unlimited possibilities is what machine learning is good at. Trained on large databases of existing molecules and their properties, the programs can explore all possible related molecules.

Algorithms have long been able to produce basic news stories from press releases or sets of financial data; that's not much of a threat to most humans in the news business. Now, however, artificial intelligence has taken a step further. It's learned to perform a tougher task – to produce convincing-looking fake news. Stringing together a few formulaic passages from a set of numbers is a mechanical job. Inventing a fake news story on a random subject requires imagination; not every human is up to it. The San Francisco-based nonprofit OpenAI, founded by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, has produced a so-called language model that can do it.

In his office in Paris's National Assembly, Cédric Villani opens a parcel: it contains a metallic spider. "Lovely," he says, putting it on a shelf, where a collection of spider-shaped objects sits next to his scientific decorations and a photo of him with Mark Zuckerberg. Villani is on a mission. Well, on several missions: the French mathematician, winner of the 2010 Fields Medal – often described as maths' Nobel Prize – sits as an MP for Emmanuel Macron's party La République en Marche, teaches at the University of Lyon, and is running for the Paris 2020 mayoralty. But the expert in mathematical analysis, famous for his academic achievements as well as for wearing spider-shaped pins on his three-piece suits, has a bigger goal: making France a leader in artificial intelligence. Appointed by the French president to set out a national AI strategy, in 2018 Villani published a report, "AI for Humanity", setting clear lines for the sector: "We must valorise our research, define our industrial priorities, work on the ethical and legal framework and on AI training," Villani says, sat among his spiders – one as big a pillow – in his office.