In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless caretaker (high bar alert) in a long series of management shifts. Visiting him at the company's offices in New York City, I ask him why he took the job. "I love turnarounds," he says. This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter.

Danish architecture studio BIG has designed Terminus AI City Operating System as a campus in Chongqing, China, that will be operated by an artificial intelligence system. BIG has drawn up the plans for smart service specialists Terminus Group, which will have its headquarters at the centre of the artificial intelligence-run city campus. Called Terminus AI City Operating System, or TACOS, everything in the city from the fire service to personal butlers would be operated by this AI. The development will be located in Chongqing Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone and will include Cloud Valley, a campus-style headquarters for Terminus Group. "We are excited to build an in-depth partnership with Terminus Group," said Ingels.

Boston Dynamics is just months away from announcing their approach to logistics, the first real vertical it aims to enter, after proving their ability to build robots at scale with the quadrupedal Spot. The company's new CEO, Robert Playter, sees the company coming into its own after decades of experimentation. Playter, interviewed on the virtual main stage of Disrupt 2020, only recently ascended from COO to that role after many years of working there, after longtime CEO and founder Marc Raibert stepped aside to focus on R&D. This is his Playter's first public speaking engagement since taking on the new responsibility, and it's clear he has big plans for Boston Robotics. The recent commercialization of Spot, the versatile quadrupedal robot that is a distant descendant of the famous Big Dog, showed Playter and the company that there is a huge demand for what they're offering, even if they're not completely sure where that demand is.

Dineo Lioma's energy and enthusiasm are infectious, and the way she speaks about things such as artificial intelligence (AI), DNA, enzymes and gene sequencing to aid those in the field of healthcare makes one believe there is hope for our virus-stricken world. Lioma has co-founded two medical technology companies, founded a third and currently runs two of them – and she is not yet 30 years old. She has a master's degree in micro and nanotechnology enterprise with distinction from Cambridge University in the UK. Cambridge offered Lioma the chance to do her PhD there to "work out how to harness solar and mechanical energy", but the engineer, who grew up fiddling with electrical plugs in her family's home in Bloemfontein, Free State, and obtained her BSc in metallurgical and materials engineering with 24 distinctions from Wits University, declined the offer. "I knew I wanted to work in the field of health and to help South Africa progress. There was not a lot going on in micro and nanotechnology here, so I came home. I wanted to give back," she says.

Following the opening of its London office in January this year, artificial intelligence (#AI) technology incubator and investor Skymind Global Ventures (SGV) announced a $800m fund to boost the AI #ecosystems in #Europe and #Asia.

These are two examples of how NASA hopes to use artificial intelligence. As far-fetched as the concept sounds, the agency is already using AI in missions on both Earth and Mars. And there are other missions in the works that could see AI exploring icy moons in search of life. This bot-friendly future stands counter to some of the fuss in the press this past week, after Facebook shut down an experiment because two artificially intelligent bots began communicating in a shorthand language instead of English. Many in the media portrayed the bots as coming up with their own language.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Google's "featured snippets"--those info boxes at the top of search results that display things like basic biographical information for prominent people, or the wrong way to caramelize onions--have long been a source of confusion. Why, for instance, would Google so confidently state that President Warren G. Harding was a member of the KKK? Now Google, long notorious for its lack of transparency, has launched a behind-the-scenes series to explain what goes into a search, starting with the announcement that it's trying to correct the "featured snippets" function. It claims that the feature currently has a failure rate of just 2.6 percent--not bad, until you realize that with 3.5 billion queries being processed every day, that means 91 million searches' worth of bogus information.

The first "SmackDown Live" exclusive pay-per-view in two and a half months is set for Sunday night in Detroit. Eight matches are scheduled for WWE Hell in a Cell 2017, including the pre-show, and four titles will be on the line. Below are predictions for every match on the WWE Hell in a Cell card. Shane McMahon vs. Kevin Owens (Hell in a Cell Falls Count Anywhere Match) This has certainly been a feud worthy of a main-event match, with the story building slowly ever since Owens joined the blue brand in May. Anything can happen when there are no disqualifications, but the logical decision is to have the actual wrestler win. Shane had the biggest moment of WrestleMania 32 before losing to The Undertaker, and he held his own with AJ Styles before getting pinned at WrestleMania 33.

Government is always being asked to do more with less -- less money, less staff, just all around less -- and that makes the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) a pretty attractive row to hoe. If a piece of technology could reduce staff workload or walk citizens through a routine process or form, you could effectively multiply a workforce without ever actually adding new people. But for every good idea, there are caveats, limitations, pitfalls and the desire to push the envelope. While innovating anything in tech is generally a good thing, when it comes to AI in government, there is fine line to walk between improving a process and potentially making it more convoluted. Outside of a few key government functions, a new white paper from the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation finds that AI could actually increase the burden of government and muddy-up the functions it is so desperately trying to improve.

Xu Li's software scans more faces than maybe any on earth. He has the Chinese police to thank. Xu runs SenseTime Group Ltd., which makes artificial intelligence software that recognizes objects and faces, and counts China's biggest smartphone brands as customers. In July, SenseTime raised $410 million, a sum it said was the largest single round for an AI company to date. That feat may soon be topped, probably by another startup in China.