Now that Sundar Pichai is running Google, the company's founders are letting him write their letter, too. On Thursday morning, Pichai took his first go at the "Founders' Letter," Google's annual, often vague view of its "unconventional" nature and future. It doesn't really contain anything new or mind-blowing. But he does put down his six areas of focus for the famously unfocused company. The letter underscores how much Google is prioritizing artificial intelligence.

Some people spend weeks, months, even years trying to learn machine learning without any success. They play around with datasets, buy books, compete on Kaggle, but ultimately make little progress. One of the big problems, is that many people just want to "dive in and build something." I admire the ambition of these students, but I absolutely think that the "just build something" method of learning a new subject is vastly overrated. In order to learn a technical subject, it pays off to have a solid understanding of the conceptual framework that underlies that subject.

Scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in blood samples faster and more accurately than the current standard methods. In one common approach to testing for cancer, doctors add biochemicals to blood samples. Those biochemicals attach biological "labels" to the cancer cells, and those labels enable instruments to detect and identify them. However, the biochemicals can damage the cells and render the samples unusable for future analyses. There are other current techniques that don't use labeling but can be inaccurate because they identify cancer cells based only on one physical characteristic. The new technique images cells without destroying them and can identify 16 physical characteristics -- including size, granularity and biomass -- instead of just one.

We both have Sony MiniDisc players (an extremely short-lived era), and Jon wants to share a song. He's picking at the headphone cables, trying to untangle the mess and keep his MiniDisc from dropping below. By the time we reach the summit, his headphones have knotted into a ball of frozen wires. Our headphones tangled with lint from our linty pockets. Yet as a product, the headphone could be the sleeper technology of the future.

On yesterday's investor call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked how the machine learning technology behind its recent introduction of bots to Messenger would manifest itself in the future. "So the biggest thing that we're focused on with artificial intelligence is building computer services that have better perception than people," he replied. "So the basic human senses like seeing, hearing, language, core things that we do. I think it's possible to get to the point in the next five to 10 years where we have computer systems that are better than people at each of those things." There are a couple of striking things about this statement: it imagines computer systems with abilities that are central to our existence as biological creatures, the essential skills that we rely on to understand and interact with the world.

The machine learning community has responded to a paper published this week that introduced a method of colorizing black-and-white photos using artificial intelligence. One redditor, mar_cnu, used this new automated colorization technique on a trailer for 1964 French film La 317 ème Section (The 317th Platoon), a black-and-white movie about a French platoon stuck behind enemy lines at the end of the Indochina War. The results are pretty cool, although the colorization isn't great. There are some shots, especially those that should have a lot of blue and green in them (like scenes in jungles or rivers), that look convincing -- at least as Technicolor film. But mostly, the method struggles to adjust itself, especially when focusing on close-ups of people, turning entire scenes green, brown, and sepia.

If you think Tickle Me Elmo is freaky already, wait until those talking monsters can beat you at Jeopardy!. Sesame Workshop, the educational nonprofit behind Sesame Street and its iconic characters, this week announced a partnership with IBM Watson to develop edtech for pre-school children. Sesame Workshop is no newcomer to tech. The organization previously set up a venture fund in partnership with Collaborative Fund. And they currently offer mobile games, story apps, e-books and digital Family Toolkits to help parents and caregivers navigate challenging topics like autism, incarceration, and more.

Alphabet CEO gives Google's chief a huge megaphone, as he lays the current and future vision of both companies. The Founders Letter is a powerful statement for Google. Start with the original "Don't be evil" mission of 2004, to last year's opus that formed Alphabet and marked a major restructuring of Google. Today, in a 2016 Founders' Letter, Alphabet CEO Larry Page hands the virtual pen to Google CEO Sundar Pichai for an update. "I wanted to give him most of the bully-pulpit here to reflect on Google's accomplishments and share his vision," Page writes, noting that we'll see him, Pichai and Sergey Brin share that space in the future.

Global insurance company MetLife is taking the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning very seriously, despite still being in the early stages of implementing and exploiting the technology, according to MetLife VP of enterprise analytics Malene Haxholdt. Haxholdt told V3 at a SAS Global Forum media event in North Carolina that the IoT has the potential to help the company develop new products, but that work in this area is still very much at an "exploratory" stage. "IoT is definitely being considered as something you have to take seriously in this business. It's not an'Oh it's going to go away' type of conversation. That data is not going away, so you have to take it seriously and figure out if there is a use for it," she said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the next big evolution for technology is artificial intelligence. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Pichai wrote in the technology giant's annual founders' letter to shareholders. His vision: Over time, computers, whatever shape they take, a mobile device in your hand or a mini computer on your wrist, "will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." This marks the first time anyone other than founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have penned the annual letter outlining Google's mission. Page and Brin wrote their first founders' letter in 2004 in which they famously warned: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."