Last March, a computer built by a team of Google engineers beat one of the world's top players at the ancient game of Go. The match between AlphaGo and Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol was so exhilarating, so upsetting, and so unexpectedly powerful, we turned it into a cover story for the magazine. On a Friday in late April, we were about an hour away from sending this story to the printer when I got an email. According to the email, Lee had won all five matches--and all against top competition--since his loss to AlphaGo. Even as it surpasses human talents, AI can also pull humans to new heights--a theme that ran through our magazine story.

While Google Allo is still fresh off the starting block, it could become the most significant chatbot messaging platform ever. Of course, for now, it does not even allow third-party participation. It's fairly limited, and it has an uphill climb if it is going to replace WhatsApp or Messenger on your phone. Yet, there are hopeful signs. The app already uses a Smart Reply feature that can parse out requests.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many aspects of our lives – even into toys for kids like Anki's Cozmo, which resembles a roboticized Ewok. But as things go, AI isn't just for devices, it's made and continues to make it's way into e-commerce and is out there working to determine what to sell to you, how you shop and ensure you have a good shopping experience. According to Gartner by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human and at the close of 2018, customer digital assistants will recognize customers by face and voice across channels. Investment-wise, in 2014 there were more than 300 million in venture capital invested in AI startups according to Bloomberg. Brands are on board and are using AI to build smarter platforms they hope will create a better online shopping experience for the consumer.

In American political campaigns, the correlation between how much attention an issue gets and the actual significance of that issue is rarely strong. In 1996, Bill Clinton campaigned for reelection with a plan for mandatory school uniforms. Four years later, Al Gore's campaign spent much energy distancing itself from a blow job his boss had received. In 2004, George W. Bush used his reelection bid to highlight the threat gay rights posed to heterosexual marriage. The financial crisis diminished the frivolous style in American politics for a couple election cycles, but it's back in full force in 2016: This year's GOP debates featured roughly as much discussion of Donald Trump's penis size as they did about climate change, while, in the general election, Hillary Clinton's IT management habits have seen more coverage than the threat monopolies pose to economic growth.

Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein's models will be automatically customized for every single customer, and it will learn, self-tune, and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Most importantly, Einstein's intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks. Just as Salesforce is no longer just Software as a Service CRM, but also a complete Platform as a Service for many types of apps to run, let's venture a guess that Einstein will at some point be made available "as a Service" for other Force.com

Though it's an integral part of a properly functioning managerial relationship, feedback remains a sticky subject for many whose jobs require them to provide it. Some fear the backlash that may result, others worry that it may jeopardize their career, and still others fret that their feedback is getting completely ignored. In fact, a recent study by VitalSmarts found that 83% of employees have witnessed a colleague say something that has had a negative impact on their careers, something the study's authors referred to as "suicide by feedback." On the other hand, regular feedback is vital for employee engagement, which can lead to profitability and productivity increases of more than 20%, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll. So how can managers get over their fear of the repercussions while keeping their employees engaged?

Twenty years ago, Stuart Russell co-wrote a book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (AIMA), destined to become the dominant text in its field. Near the end of the book, he posed a question: "What if A.I. does succeed?" Today, progress toward human-level artificial intelligence (A.I.) is advancing rapidly, and Russell, a professor of computer science, is posing the same question with more urgency. The benefits of A.I. are not at issue. If improperly constrained, Russell warns, a machine as smart as or smarter than humans "is of no use whatsoever -- in fact it's catastrophic."

Quoc Le is no stranger to the indignity of translation. Whenever the Google research scientist in Mountain View, California, visits his native Vietnam, he laughs with his parents over mistranslations in the very system he is helping shape, the 10-year-old online service Google Translate. Most errors are tiny--not important enough to remember. But together, they tell a larger story: "Translation is not a solved problem," he says. But that may all change soon.

I am a big fan of the authors 1999 book on Statistical Natural Language Processing, and I and was thrilled when I found this new book online -- just search for "Information Retrieval" on Google. In these two books, they describe the theory behind a vast toolbox which can be used to construct new tools/products for the Internet. Now I can go back to them when the need arises. For starters, I appreciate the detailed theoretical explanations of topics that I could not find in other texts, and the references to related work are especially helpful. One of the other books I read was Information Retrieval by Grossman, which is an older book but has a more condensed style compared to this.

While there is the paper, the blogpost is a fun read and usually more digestible.