Just after 2am Pacific Time on Monday morning, several OpenAI staffers, including its chief technology officer Mira Murati, posted in unison on X "OpenAI is nothing without its people." Sam Altman, who was dramatically removed as the company's chief executive on Friday, reposted many of them. By then, Altman already had a new job. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, a major investor and partner of OpenAI, announced late on Sunday night that Altman and his cofounder Greg Brockman would be joining the tech giant to head a new "advanced AI research team." Nadella's statement seemed to suggest that others from the startup would be joining Microsoft.

If you ask multiple technical artists what they do, the chances are you'll get very different responses. Although there are generalists, it is more often an umbrella that encompasses a number of specialist disciplines such as environment, shaders, VFX, and pipeline, to name just a few, so you could be involved more with the front-end or the back-end. Naturally, this also varies hugely from studio to studio. However, if we're to explain the essence of the role, then Jodie Azhar, technical art director at Silver Rain Games says: "Technical artists are problem solvers." "Quite often they will be creating tools to solve these problems, for instance creating a procedural system to save time for an environment artist from doing very repetitive tasks. It also involves being the bridge between the art and programming sides of game development. "They can act like translators between artists and programmers," she adds. "They need to understand artists' processes and how they want something to ...

This post is part of x.ai's'Future of Jobs' interview series. We're talking to leaders and mavericks to find out how emerging technologies like AI are changing how they do their jobs. You can find all the posts in the series here. Named a LinkedIn "Top Voice" for the past two years, Azeem Azhar has established himself as a vital voice at the intersection of technology and society. Founder of the venture-backed startup PeerIndex, the entrepreneur, investor, and former reporter currently publishes the essential weekly newsletter Exponential View.

Last week, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Autumn Budget a £500m package of investment into tech initiatives, including the development of artificial intelligence. Which must have had the Channel 4 executives ordering trebles all round, because with perfect timing they've designated this week the "Rise of the Robots season", with a schedule that includes documentaries on the take-off of artificial intelligences (AIs) as consulting doctors, a David Tennant-narrated piece on the challenge of making robots as human as possible, and the one that's had the tabloids hot under the collar, today'sThe Sex Robots Are Coming – which needs little further explanation. Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Sex-Bots aside, though, is it actually possible that the dream of science fiction writers going back a century or more is on the verge of reality? Are we really about to live in the long-promised future of robots and AIs? As they used to say on the old Six Million Dollar Man TV show (point of order – Steve Austin was a cyborg, not a robot), we have the technology… or we're about to.

A couple of years ago, machine learning suddenly started appearing on the horizon in enterprise software. Systems of engagement ceased to be the new frontier of innovation as'systems of intelligence' rapidly became all the rage. Nowadays, no self-respecting enterprise software vendor can be seen to be without a strategy for applying artifical intelligence to their systems. These AI-enriched, cloud-based systems promise a higher level of automation and productivity by discovering patterns in past behavior and then acting on them when the same conditions reoccur. Benefits are promised across every kind of enterprise function -- whether it's raising the success rate of salespeople, improving collections, planning projects more efficiently or fixing defective equipment before it fails.

Tech giants are making acquisitions in the AI space, and an increasing number of startups are working with the technology. Speaking at The Europas, a European startup conference held in London today, John Henderson, principal at Whitestar Capital, spoke about the overwhelming competition in the space and noted the need for young tech firms to stand out from the crowd. "When it comes to investing in AI startups what we look for and what is hard to find is defensibility," he said. DeepMind – acquired by Google in 2014 – Henderson argued was "a one-off". "It [DeepMind] was acquired for the research talent. Startups out there need to think about AI as an enabling technology or a platform, as opposed to every startup building their own AI technology," added Henderson.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains one of the biggest mysteries in tech, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it. Google set up the board at DeepMind's request after the cofounders of the 400 million research-intensive AI lab said they would only agree to the acquisition if Google promised to look into the ethics of the technology it was buying into. Business Insider asked Google once again who is on its AI ethics board and what they do but it declined to comment. A number of AI experts told Business Insider that it's important to have an open debate about the ethics of AI given the potential impact it's going to have on all of our lives. Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that understand and learn from observations without the need to be explicitly programmed, as defined by Nathan Benaich, an AI investor at venture capital firm Playfair Capital.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains one of the biggest mysteries in tech, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it. Google set up the board at DeepMind's request after the cofounders of the 400 million research-intensive AI lab said they would only agree to the acquisition if Google promised to look into the ethics of the technology it was buying into. Business Insider asked Google once again who is on its AI ethics board and what they do but it declined to comment. A number of AI experts told Business Insider that it's important to have an open debate about the ethics of AI given the potential impact it's going to have on all of our lives. Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that understand and learn from observations without the need to be explicitly programmed, as defined by Nathan Benaich, an AI investor at venture capital firm Playfair Capital.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains one of the biggest mysteries in tech, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it. Google set up the board at DeepMind's request after the cofounders of the 400 million research-intensive AI lab said they would only agree to the acquisition if Google promised to look into the ethics of the technology it was buying into. Business Insider asked Google once again who is on its AI ethics board and what they do but it declined to comment. A number of AI experts told Business Insider that it's important to have an open debate about the ethics of AI given the potential impact it's going to have on all of our lives. Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that understand and learn from observations without the need to be explicitly programmed.

About.me/Azeem AzharAzeem Azhar is the author of a daily AI newsletter. An artificial intelligence (AI) expert has explained what went wrong with Microsoft's new AI chat bot on Wednesday, suggesting that it could have been programmed to blacklist certain words and phrases. Microsoft designed "Tay" to respond to users' queries on Twitter with the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. But within hours of launching, the'teen girl' AI had turned into a Hitler-loving sex robot, forcing Microsoft to embark on a mass-deleting spree. AI expert Azeem Azhar told Business Insider: "There are a number of precautionary steps they [Microsft] could have taken. It wouldn't have been too hard to create a blacklist of terms; or narrow the scope of replies. They could also have simply manually moderated Tay for the first few days, even if that had meant slower responses."