The world's most powerful person used to be Vladimir Putin. This year he was defeated by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, according to the Forbes ranking of powerful people who make you question what you've been doing with your life so far. It's safe to say that Mr. Putin knows plenty about power, and he believes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will not only change the world as we know it, but the global balance of power as well. It looks like other world leaders agree, with China and the US fighting for AI supremacy and the EU scrambling to catch up. Real growth is fueled by cold hard cash, so we've put together a list of the 10 biggest artificial intelligence startups in the world by funding.

The first rocket engines for a secretive hypersonic spaceplane the military could one day use to launch satellites at short notice have been completed. The reusable Phantom Express spaceplane will take off vertically and land horizontally, and is being built by Boeing as part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Experimental Spaceplane program. It is hoped it will play a crucial role in future space warfare, allowing military bosses to launch satellites and replace damaged ones within hours. The reusable Phantom Express spaceplane will take off vertically and land horizontally, and is being built by Boeing as part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Experimental Spaceplane program. The vehicle will be equipped with an expendable second stage capable of placing up to 3,000 pounds (1,361 kg) of payload into low Earth orbit.

With the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) being held later this month, it might be a good time to start thinking about the very possible future of AI in schools and what it might mean for your children -- both the good and the bad. If you're a parent or in the education field, you will no doubt be up to date on the ways that education in public schools and universities across the nation have already been steadily adapting towards a more technology-driven and data-producing form. Gone are the dusty chalkboards, the endless piles of handwritten essays, the class trips to the magical and always-too-warm computer lab, and those annoying moments when "that" student decides to spend 25 minutes staring out of the window while "using the pencil sharpener." Instead, students across the nation are utilizing Google's Chromebooks and collaborating on shared documents. What's more, they're learning to code as a basic element of their curriculum.

Spotify is gearing up to launch its own range of hardware products fuelling rumours the company plans to launch its own smart speaker. The music streaming service has registered with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), paving the way for it to sell hardware products for the first time. Without proper certification from the FCC, it is impossible to market or sell wireless products in the United States. Spotify has yet to submit any hardware for certification from the US government agency. The company has long been rumoured to be developing its own hardware, however, its registration with the FCC is the first evidence it is considering bringing products to market.

Technology and security industries have turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning with a fervor once reserved for the latest iPhone release. On the expo floor at a cybersecurity show, professionals are hard pressed to collect a vendor flier without AI or ML mentioned at least once. Can the hype deliver -- let alone last? Machine learning is reaching the end of its peak of inflated expectations, poised for an imminent descent to the trough of disillusionment on Gartner's hype cycle. Business professionals who have been riding the ML high may be in store for a "hangover" when that trough hits, according to TK Keanini, distinguished engineer and product line CTO for analytics at Cisco, speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Maryland on Monday.

Russia's Kalashnikov arms manufacturer (part of state hi-tech corporation Rostec) has developed certain expertise in creating military systems with artificial intelligence that implies weapons' self-learning, Industrial Director of the Rostec Conventional Armament, Ammunition and Special Chemistry Cluster Sergei Abramov said on Wednesday. The Rostec official spoke at the conference tiled: "Digital Industry of Industrial Russia 2018." The need, prospects and expediency of creating and adapting artificial intelligence systems for military use do not evoke any doubts and all the leading countries are taking efforts for introducing artificial intelligence into existing and future weapons, he said. "The developers of military hardware consider this task largely as an engineering effort: to create the corresponding software and hardware meeting the Defense Ministry's requirements. In this regard, we should note the expertise accumulated by the Kalashnikov Group that has achieved certain successes in this sphere," Abramov said, without specifying the weapon systems.

Facebook's data-sharing deals with device-makers included China's Huawei -- a company viewed with suspicion by U.S. intelligence agencies. Here, an ad for the Huawei P20 smartphone is seen in China last month. Facebook's data-sharing deals with device-makers included China's Huawei -- a company viewed with suspicion by U.S. intelligence agencies. Here, an ad for the Huawei P20 smartphone is seen in China last month. Facebook's longstanding agreements that led it to share users' data with device-makers included Chinese phone-maker Huawei – a company of which the U.S. government has long been suspicious, and which intelligence officials view as a security threat.

A creepy new AI that transfers facial expressions between people in videos could make fake clips even more realistic. The neural network manipulates facial movements in real footage to produce deceptive videos that can make people appear to say something they didn't. In one example, scientists accurately mapped Barack Obama's facial movements onto Vladimir Putin, making it appear as if the Russian President was reading Obama's speech. A new AI that transfers facial expressions between people in videos could make fake clips even more realistic. Created by an international group of engineers led by Stanford University researchers, the AI only needs a few minutes of video to perfect each imitation.

Summary: There is a great hue and cry about the danger of bias in our predictive models when applied to high significance events like who gets a loan, insurance, a good school assignment, or bail. It's not as simple as it seems and here we try to take a more nuanced look. The result is not as threatening as many headlines make it seem. Is social bias in our models a threat to equal and fair treatment? There's even an entire conference dedicated to the topic: the conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* – it's their acronym, I didn't make this up) now in its fifth year.

The democratization of mass surveillance is upon us. Insanely cheap tools with the power to track individuals en masse are now available for anyone to use, as exemplified by a Forbes test of an Amazon facial recognition product, Rekognition, that made headlines last month. Jeff Bezos' behemoth of a business is seen by most as a consumer-driven business, not a provider of easy-to-use spy tech. But as revealed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is shipping Rekognition to various U.S. police departments. And because Rekognition is open to all, Forbes decided to try out the service. Based on photos staff consensually provided, and with footage shot across our Jersey City and London offices, we discovered it took just a few hours, some loose change and a little technical knowledge to establish a super-accurate facial recognition operation.