Seriously, are you not bored of people like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, who are frequently claiming that artificial intelligence (AI) is a big threat to human society? Those discussions let people think AI is going to steal everyone's job and start the next world war. Even worse, it fuels expectations to a point that the general public is getting the idea that AI research has recently made quantum leaps. And thanks to raising these expectations we could easily run into an AI winter again. Keep calm: we are far away from creating a super-intelligence Musk and Hawking are talking about or what Hollywood is showing us with movies like Ex Machina, Her or AI.

Each January, tech companies from around the world gather in Las Vegas to show off their latest efforts at CES, formerly called the Consumer Electronics Show, the biggest gadget show of the year. While the products and demos showcased at CES don't always reflect the technology you'll be able to buy in the near future, the show does offer some insight into where tech giants are putting their time and resources. This year was all about improving communication between smart home gadgets, making the car feel more personal, and putting screens everywhere imaginable. Here's a look at some of the coolest products we came across on the CES showroom floor. L'Oréal's UV Sense is a tiny sensor capable of detecting ultraviolet exposure that's small enough to wear comfortably on your fingernail. The sensor itself is battery-free and includes an NFC antenna, a temperature sensor, and a UV sensor.

That crazy booth in the Convention Center parking lot seemed like a terrible idea on Tuesday when the rains opened up and swallowed it whole -- but a day later, when the lights went out on CES for a few hours, everyone came running to Google and its free donuts. Our own booth at the Sands, meanwhile, where a number of us were posted up for much of the week, was way too close to the giant Google gumball machine.

Semiconductor giant MediaTek announced several new products and partnerships at CES 2018. These include a partnership with Alibaba AI Labs, new chips for UHD Smart TV platforms, portfolio of Wi-Fi chipsets for IoT devices, solutions for smart home devices, and AI solutions for cross platform devices. Partnership with Alibaba AI Labs At CES 2018, MediaTek announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba's AI division. Under this partnership, the companies will work on smart home standards, customised IoT chips, and AI smart hardware. The partnership also revealed a Smartmesh connectivity solution in China that will help increase adoption in smart home settings. Smartmesh will enable smart home devices to pair with Tmall Genie, Alibaba's voice-controlled virtual assistant.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), technology companies from around the world unveil and showcase their latest and greatest inventions. This year, Intel announced a new 49-qubit chip, HTC released a new virtual reality (VR) headset, and Fisker revealed an electric car with a 644-km (400-mi) range. In addition, home assistants, health improvement gadgets, and domestic help robots dominated the scene in Las Vegas. CES is the genesis of many transformative tech trends, and 2018 is no exception. This year the CES venue was inundated with Amazon's Alexa devices.

As they say in relationship counseling, communication is everything in nurturing a successful happy marriage. Thus, it was with considerable fascination the other day that I listened as a colleague offhandedly mentioned that his spouse was "jealous" of his new Google Home, to which she promptly replied that it was true and that he now asked the home device all of the casual questions he used to ask her, from tomorrow's weather to today's headlines to what time the grocery store closed tonight. The casual back-and-forth banter that cements a long-term relationship was being replaced by an all-knowing AI assistant. What does this suggest about the future of AI in our homes? Gone are the primitive voice recognition tools of a decade ago that required hours-long training sessions and bizarre speech patterns of speaking a single word at a time and computer-like primitive vocabularies.

Unless you live under a rock, you probably saw headlines this week about a war between Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Alexa in personal computers and AR glasses may be a bit surprising, but the CES 2018 theme seemed to be the same as last year: more cars and auto appliances with AI assistants, and more smart home devices for the kitchen, family room, and bedroom that respond to voice commands and talk to Alexa and Google Assistant. In addition to Alexa in everything from a car cockpit to a toilet, Samsung's Bixby, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant all showed up to vie for the world's attention. Away from Las Vegas, reports of a Facebook video chat device named Portal that responds to voice commands also made news this week. CES this year made clear the distinction in strategy between these tech giants that no longer treat their assistants as a novelty, but rather as a major selling point and part of their brand identity.

PitchBook, a Morningstar company, tracks every aspect of the public and private equity markets, including venture capital, private equity, and M&A. LAS VEGAS--For many of us, it feels like the future is now, and that's largely thanks to AI-powered technology such as virtual assistants and robots. AI is on the front lines of new technology, and venture capital investors have certainly taken note, pouring more and more money into the space each year. But there's still a lot to come for the red-hot industry. That's the view from a panel of AI executives who attended CES.

For years, marketers have talked about brands as having personalities. Now they have the tools to bring those brands to life – virtually at least. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are being combined with Academy Award-winning animation skills to create virtual humans that are the closest yet to flesh and blood. And for brands, that offers the opportunity to put a very human-looking face on a corporate body. One of the latest iterations of these virtual humans comes from Auckland-based company, Soul Machines, whose co-founder and CEO, Mark Sagar's ground-breaking work in computer-generated faces on films, King Kong and Avatar, was recognised with consecutive Oscars.

Does a robot manage your money? For many of us, the answer is yes. Online and algorithmic investment and financial advice is easy to come by these days, usually under the moniker of "robo-advisor." Startups such as Wealthfront, Personal Capital, and Betterment launched robo-advisors as industry disruptors, and incumbents, such as Schwab's (Intelligent Advisor), Vanguard (Personal Advisor Services), Morgan Stanley and BlackRock have joined the fray with their own hybrid machine/advisor solutions. It's clear that robo-advisors and AI play an important and growing role in the financial services industry, but a question remains. Will robo-advisors disrupt corporate capital allocation the same way they have personal capital allocation?