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Our timeline visualizes AI company exits valued at $1B at acquisition or IPO, including electric AV company NIO's public offering and Roche's massive acquisition of cancer tech company Flatiron Health. Artificial intelligence is a sector that attracts big investor checks: Q2'19 recently saw record quarterly funding to AI startups at $7.4B. This included several $100M mega-deals to companies like robotic process automation company UiPath and AI-powered insurance startup Lemonade. It's also a sector that produces some very valuable exits. Download the free report to learn about the biggest emerging trends in AI and strategies to watch for 2019.

What does it mean to read a poem, story, or novel about the human condition written entirely by a computer? This is not a crazy question. Legendary author Roald Dahl had already conjured up this nightmarish scenario for authors in one of his unnerving short stories in Someone Like You (1953). It tells the tale of the Great Automatic Grammatizator, a mammoth machine able to write prizewinning novels based on the works of living authors in 15 minutes flat. Dahl died before such a machine was within the realm of possibility.

The Metropolis (Released in 1927 in Germany) is a black and white science fiction movie. It is a silent movie available with a musical score and subtitles in English. The movie was directed by Fritz Lang. It shows a grim futuristic society in the city of Metropolis which is inhabited by two distinct classes: the industrialists live off the fat of the land, supported by the workers who live under the city and endure a bare-bones existence of backbreaking work. The story concerns a relationship between Freder (played by Gustav Fröhlich), a young man from the industrialist class, and Maria (Brigitte Helm), an activist who preaches against the divide between the two classes.

"Our AI takes about 20 moves, most of the time solving it in the minimum number of steps," Baldi says. "Right there, you can see the strategy is different, so my best guess is that the AI's form of reasoning is completely different from a human's." The ultimate goal of projects such as this one is to build the next generation of AI systems, Baldi says. Whether they know it or not, artificial intelligence touches people every day through apps such as Siri and Alexa and recommendation engines working behind the scenes of their favorite online services. "But these systems are not really intelligent; they're brittle, and you can easily break or fool them," Baldi says.

When athletes and organizers descend on Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games, they'll be ferried around in autonomous cars, while torch relay runners will be accompanied by AI-equipped cars. Robots will ferry javelins and hammers. All told, Toyota Motor Corp. will provide 3,700 vehicles, including dozens of self-driving cars, about 500 fuel-cell vehicles and 850 battery-electric cars to the international sports competition. As a top sponsor of the Tokyo Olympics and an automaker facing a murky future when gasoline-powered engines will fade away, Toyota is doing everything it can to market its transition into an eventual provider of on-demand transportation for consumers and businesses, instead of being merely an industrial manufacturer. "We want to use the Olympics and Paralympics that happen every two years as a milestone," Masaaki Ito, general manager of Toyota's Olympic and Paralympic Division, said in an interview.

DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, can find the solution in a fraction of a second, without any specific domain knowledge or in-game coaching from humans.

DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, can find the solution in a fraction of a second, without any specific domain knowledge or in-game coaching from humans.

The invention of an artificial super-intelligence has been a central theme in science fiction since at least the 19th century. From E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops (1909) to the recent HBO television series Westworld, writers have tended to portray this possibility as an unmitigated disaster. But this issue is no longer one of fiction. Prominent contemporary scientists and engineers are now also worried that super-AI could one day surpass human intelligence (an event known as the "singularity") and become humanity's "worst mistake". Current trends suggest we are set to enter an international arms race for such a technology.

LIKE other human champions facing a machine opponent, Grzegorz "MaNa" Komincz rated his chances. "A realistic goal would be 4-1 in," he my favour told an interviewer before the match. One of the world's best players of video game StarCraft II, Komincz was at the height of a successful esports career. Artificial intelligence company DeepMind invited him to face its latest AI, a StarCraft II-playing bot called AlphaStar, on 19 December 2018. Komincz was expected to be a tough opponent.

Microsoft's listening program continues to grow in scope after a new report reveals that contractors harvested unintentional audio from Xbox users through Cortana and the Kinect. Motherboard reports that Xbox users were recorded by Microsoft as part of a program to analyze users' voice-commands for accuracy and that those recordings were assessed by human contractors. While the program was designed to only scrape audio uttered after a wake-word, contractors hired by Microsoft report that some recordings were taken accidentally without provocation. The practice, reports Motherboard, has been ongoing for several years since the early days of Xbox One and predates Xbox's integration with its voice assistant, Cortana. Xbox users were being recorded by Microsoft in a listening program that scraped audio from Cortana and its augmented reality hardware, Kinect.