Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it'll reward you for speaking its native language. But if you took a look beneath the pixels--the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)--deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game's sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly. Because if/when the machines take over, we should at least speak their language. Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called "high-level" because they work sort of like human language, written in commands and idioms that might fit in at a poetry slam.

Breakthroughs don't often happen in neuroscience, but we just had one. In a tour-de-force, an international team released the full brain connectivity map of the young fruit fly, described in a paper published last week in Science. Containing 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, the map--called a connectome--is the most complex whole-brain wiring diagram to date. "It's a'wow,'" said Dr. Shinya Yamamoto at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in the work. Far from uninvited guests at the dinner table, Drosophila melanogaster is a neuroscience darling.

"As humans, we are highly biased," says Beena Ammanath, the global head of the Deloitte AI Institute, and tech and AI ethics lead at Deloitte. "And as these biases get baked into the systems, there is very high likelihood of sections of society being left behind--underrepresented minorities, people who don't have access to certain tools--and it can drive more inequity in the world." Projects that begin with good intentions -- to create equal outcomes or mitigate past inequities -- can still end up biased if systems are trained with biased data or researchers aren't accounting for how their own perspectives affect lines of research. Thus far, adjusting for AI biases has often been reactive with the discovery of biased algorithms or underrepresented demographics emerging after the fact, says Ammanath. But, companies now have to learn how to be proactive, to mitigate these issues early on, and to take accountability for missteps in their AI endeavors.

The success and growth of AI is undeniable. Yet there are still basic tasks performing poorly, despite or because of automation. In some cases, you can blame reliance on outdated AI. In other cases, it is a result of corporate policies or multiple AI systems that compete against each other. The AI systems in question may be top notch, but they play against each other. It is similar to a Wall Street firm using two separate, competing black box trading systems, resulting in cannibalism.

The success and growth of AI is undeniable. Yet there are still basic tasks performing poorly, despite or because of automation. In some cases, you can blame reliance on outdated AI. In other cases, it is a result of corporate policies or multiple AI systems that compete against each other. The AI systems in question may be top notch, but they play against each other.

If a business isn't using AI, then it's either claiming to use it or claiming that it's about to start any day now. Whatever problem your company is having, it seems that a solution powered by decision intelligence, machine learning or some other form of AI is available. Yet, beneath the marketing hype, the truth is that many businesses can indeed benefit from this tech – if they take the time to learn what it can (and can't) do for them and understand the potential pitfalls. In essence, AI enables its users to do useful things with a large pool of data – for instance, fish out insights without tying up the time of data scientists. Data is therefore fundamental to AI.

Google has finally announced the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, its dual flagship phones intended to take on Samsung and Apple. "The product is really, now, The Google Phone," Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh has said, "so we are ready to invest a lot in marketing and we want to grow." The two phones, which were revealed in full at an event today, focus on Google's machine learning capabilities with a new Tensor SSC chip and its recently released Android 12 operating system, to make what Google claims is the "most personal and most helpful phone". With regards to the device's specifications, the Pixel 6 has a 6.4-inch 60-90Hz OLED display, a 4600mAh battery, 8GB of RAM with 128 or 256GB of storage. The Pixel 6 Pro, meanwhile, has a larger 6.7-inch OLED with a 120Hz refresh rate screen.

As soon as machine learning systems get better at designing other machine learning systems than human experts, the age of Homo sapiens will come to an end. After all, those slightly better systems will build systems that are slightly better still. At least, that's what several people, including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, and Elon Musk, think about the potential risk of artificial intelligence and its dominance over humans. There are more ways than one to arrive at superintelligence, but AI is perhaps the most obvious one. Fortunately (?), we don't have an AI-building AI yet.

See also our related columns The Turning Point, Techie Tuesdays, and Storybites. Though artificial intelligence (AI) may not surpass human intelligence for at least a few more decades, it opens up opportunities and challenges that we must address today in order to shape a better world for us all. A call to action for business leaders, entrepreneurs, academics, and policymakers is effectively made in Toby Walsh's new book, 2062: The World that AI Made. The rise of AI poses serious philosophical, economic and social questions for all of us, and more vision and collaboration are urgently called for. How many jobs will AI take away or create?

One of the challenges in developing AI applications is obtaining the vast amount of data that's required. Making matters worse, regulations and privacy issues pose obstacles to firms' sharing their data. A possible solution is for firms to form a "data trust." Willis Towers Watson recently piloted a data trust together with several of its clients. This article shared what they learned about how to create such a trust.