Artificial intelligence that scans GP records to find hidden patterns has helped doctors detect significantly more cancer cases. The rate of cancer detection rose from 58.7% to 66.0% at GP practices using the "C the Signs" AI tool. This analyses a patient's medical record to pull together their past medical history, test results, prescriptions and treatments, as well as other personal characteristics that might indicate cancer risk, such as their postcode, age and family history. It also prompts GPs to ask patients about any new symptoms, and if the tool detects patterns in the data that indicate a higher risk of a particular type of cancer, then it recommends which tests or clinical pathway the patient should be referred to. C the Signs is used in about 1,400 practices in England – about 15% – and was tested in 35 practices in the east of England in May 2021, covering a population of 420,000 patients.

It had a great new idea for a movie--Elemental, based on characters from The Good Dinosaur's director Peter Sohn--but actually animating the film's titular elements was proving to be a problem. After all, it's one thing to draw a crumbling mound of sentient dirt, but how do you capture the ethereal nature of fire onscreen, and how would a corporeal body made of water even work? Can you see through it? Do the eyes just float around? While some of those questions could be answered with good old-fashioned suspension of disbelief, Pixar's animators thought the fire issue was a real conundrum, especially considering that one of their movie's leads, Ember, was actually supposed to be made of the stuff. They had tools to make a flame effect from years of previous animations, but when you actually tried to shape it into a character, the results were pretty terrifying, a cross between Studio Ghibli's Calcifer and Nicolas Cage's Ghost Rider, but somehow harsher.

When OpenAI's DALL.E 2 was released two weeks back, the AI tool's ability to create images using sparse natural language instructions caused an online frenzy. Whatever its predecessor DALL.E could do, DALL.E 2 could do better. After the announcement, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman spoke about the potential upsides of DALL.E 2 and the general direction that AI was moving towards in his blog. According to Altman, the general idea that AI's contributions would affect physical labour first, followed by cognitive labour and then eventually reach creative work has been reversed in reality. "It now looks like it's going to go in the opposite order," he noted.

Ever since Alan Turing's seminal work on how computers can mimic human beings, AI or Artificial Intelligence has seen an exponential development in the field of technology and cognitive science. Artificial Intelligence at its core refers to the simulation of human intelligence and actions in computers and machines so that they can mimic our activities and think like us. These days we move about in our day-to-day lives with AI being there like an omnipresent entity. Be it SIRI on your iPhone or Alexa on your smart home device, AI is there to help us out in our day-to-day activities. You can even have conversations at length with these AI, albeit the range of responses is limited and banks on the availability of the Internet. Smart home devices now let us control all our indoor appliances using AI-driven technology, making our lives so much easier and comfortable.

Exploring the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in our day to day lives, computer whiz kid Tanmay Bakshi said at an event in Greater Noida that instances of fake news, hate speech and harassment on social media can be dealt with the use of AI. Fifteen-year-old Bakshi, the world's youngest IBM Watson programmer, was at Sharda University in Greater Noida on Friday for a TED Talk with students on computer programming and the future of artificial intelligence. He said AI can be monumental in curbing fake news and hate speech. "Fake news is huge and I myself have been a victim of it where one of my TED Talk videos was uploaded on Facebook with the caption that I work for Google and I make billions of dollars a year. I believe social media giants have started using AI to clamp down on fake news and hate speech. For example, Facebook is using machine learning (alternatively known as AI) to understand the content being put up, match it with trusted sources, understand the different point of views which people can have, and when they are absolutely sure that it is fake news then it will be automatically flagged for deletion," Bakshi said.

Even if specialists could read one page a minute, they still wouldn't be able to finish reading all the information that's being published. Then, it takes time to understand that information and incorporate it into their diagnoses and treatments. "That's impossible for a human," says Bakshi. "We are simply not capable of that. Our cognition doesn't let us do that."

The last time I met Tanmay Bakshi, the world's youngest IBM Watson programmer at 13, he was just a child prodigy. Our conversation in June last year, which resulted in this video that now has over 2,00,000 views on YouTube, was mostly about things that child prodigies are made of -- learning to code early, stardom, and so on. Nine months later, last Tuesday, I got on a call with Bakshi to record this episode of Outliers, and I was blown away. He still sounds the same -- one word tumbling upon another, yet each emphasised with great passion. This time though, he seems to have found a new life mission, and some serious new questions for himself to answer.

One of today's driving forces behind cognitive technologies such as artificial intelligence is 13-year-old Tanmay Bakshi (pictured), developer and IBM Champion for cloud. However, being the youngest developer to work on IBM Corp.'s Watson AI platform is clearly not enough for this talented teenager. He is now working on an AI-based project called The Cognitive Story, which senses people's intentions and articulates them to individuals or machines. "I'm working on many new projects with artificial intelligence, of course IBM Watson [and] ones provided by Darwin Ecosystem LLC," Bakshi said. "We are working on this really interesting project called "The Cognitive Story," [which] is basically this collaboration between IBM, Darwin Ecosystem, Not Rocket Science Inc. and me. We are working toward using the power of cognitive in order to change people's life in a positive way."