In the past decade, storied brands like meal-replacement Huel and men's grooming company Harry's built multibillion-dollar retail businesses by using social media and digital-first advertising to sell directly to consumers online, without the need for middlemen. These brands were exemplars of a new form of retail, called direct-to-consumer (DTC). The global pandemic only accelerated this trend, with many high-street stores being forced to close and to keep driving sales by going direct to shoppers online. Some brands successfully navigated the transition, like outdoor pizza oven maker Ooni, whose sales exploded during lockdown, with annual revenue up from £13.7 million ($167 million) in 2019 to £52.7 million in 2020. Shoppers also adapted--around 60 percent purchased from a direct-to-consumer brand at least once in 2021.

Today, companies are faced with two enormous challenges: complexity coupled with an ever-increasing speed of change. Technology like artificial intelligence (AI) can help to overcome those challenges. These technological advancements are automating, augmenting and combining human intelligence and the power of decision intelligence to enable smarter and more efficient decision-making processes. Ronald van Loon is a paretos partner and has used the decision intelligence platform to support key business decisions. Businesses must maintain a heightened awareness of ever-changing circumstances and real-world scenarios, analyze these perspectives and information, and act with timing.

AI has done remarkably well in performing specific functions with the level of accuracy it displays. But does that mean it has come close to human intelligence? I will begin by acknowledging Ragnar Fjelland, whose paper forms the primary inspiration for this article. The three milestones led to the impression that an AI closer to human intelligence is just "around the corner." First Milestone: The first milestone, according to Fjelland, in AI research is IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue.

Agencies and marketing departments have long used machine learning algorithms to sift through data, spot trends and steer creative campaigns.

This week, guest host Zak Rosen from The Best Advice Show and Slate's Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast talks to Liza Bielby and Richard Newman of the Detroit-based theater company The Hinterlands. They talk about how The Hinterlands' latest production Will You Miss Me? came into being, their influences, their rehearsal process, and the importance of deadlines After the interview, Zak and co-host June Thomas chat about collaboration, how to kill your darlings, and how Zak implements Julia Cameron's concept of the "artist's date." Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675.

What is The Universal Machine Intelligence Model (UMIM), the #RealityAI? UMIM, as real autonomous artificial intelligence (RAAI) with deep causal learning, knowledge and understanding about the world of reality provided by its key components/modules: Machine World Model, world model engine (WME); Master Algorithm; World Data Framework World Data; Global Knowledge Base, World.Net; Domain Knowledge Base, Domain.Net; The project of creating human-like and human-level artificial intelligence (hlhlAI) as Artificial General Intelligence as machine intelligence and learning in three ways: Assuming that machine intelligence replicates/imitate only special parts of human intelligence, cognition or intelligent behavior, ML, DL, ANNs, developing #artificialintelligence ONLY for specific purposes (ANI); Assuming that machine intelligence is NOT identical to human intelligence, Weak AI; Assuming that machine intelligence is identical to human intelligence, Strong AI; My position is different, relying on science and its key subject of reality and interactions. First, we SHOULD not develop computers with human-like intelligence, but with human-level intelligence and beyond. Second, computer intelligence/power will never develop into human reason, the two are fundamentally different. Third, computers SHOULD have a causal model of reality, or machine intelligence and learning (MIL) must be Causal/Real MIL.

Prof. Aleks Farseev is an entrepreneur, research professor, keynote speaker, and the CEO of SoMin.ai, a long-tail ad optimization platform. Not too long ago, I was asked to present a tool to some of my clients. It was a simple prototype, where a person would type in a few things (i.e., advertising channel, product and occasion), and in turn, the machine would give a number of sample ads. When I clicked the button, in just a few seconds, the machine spat out several ads complete with images and text. The first comment was, "Wow, that was really fast." What would take a person a few hours to do, this machine did in but a fraction.

When she launched the Microwave Video Festival, in 1996, Hong Kong artist and independent curator Ellen Pau had to assure her backers at the city's municipal council that she would avoid the most sophisticated media art from other parts of the world. You can tell from the wording of the original press release, in which she was quoted as saying that the festival would bring "simply produced, yet creative" videos that were "relatable" and "inspiring" to local people. "There was definitely a nervousness about new media and using technology in the arts at the Urban Council," she says. "For the festival to go ahead, I felt it was safer to reassure officials that we wouldn't overwhelm the audience with feats of computing and engineering. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Recently, one of the researchers at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab was taking her 4-year-old son for a walk through the campus. The little boy looked up at the famous campanile clock tower and exclaimed with surprise and puzzlement, "There's a clock way up there!" Then, after a few minutes, he thoughtfully explained, "I guess they put the clock up there so that the children couldn't reach it and break it." Everyone with a 4-year-old has similar stories of preschool creativity--charming, unexpected takes on the world and its mysteries that nevertheless have their own logic and sense. Suppose you ask a Large Language Artificial Intelligence (AI) model the same question: Why is there a clock on top of the campanile?

We should be living in a golden age of science. For centuries, the scientific method was defined by two pillars--theory and experiment. Now, we live in the age of Artificial Intelligence, which adds a vital third pillar. Without advanced computation, according to leading scientific bodies, discoveries of the past decade, such as the detection of the Higgs boson, the discovery of new drugs like halicin, which can kill strains of bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics, or the observation of gravitational waves, "would have been impossible". But despite these advances, scientific innovation today is too often defined by new use cases for existing technologies or refining previous advancements, rather than the creation of entirely new fields of discovery.