When you think of leaders in artificial intelligence, you probably picture sneaker-wearing, baby-faced Silicon Valley-types like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. But one of the the biggest funders of AI is 77-year-old Blackstone CEO and Republican megadonor Steve Schwarzman - who says his favorite app is'email.' Schwarzman, who was still using a basic flip phone at the time, became enamored with AI in 2015, when the co-founder of Alibaba told him that AI is the wave of the future and would change job functions, drug development and education. Since then, Schwarzman has invested more than 500 million dollars in the advancement of AI and has donated millions of dollars to Yale University to establish a center for AI advancements and to create the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI. Steve Schwarzman had a brief stint in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1970 before he headed to Harvard Business School In the midst of concerns over an AI takeover, Schwarzman, who is worth 37.8 billion, is now working to promote AI and reassure the public that the technology is meant to assist with daily tasks, not to replace humans.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that an artificial intelligence machine cannot qualify as an "inventor" for the purposes of Sections 7 and 13 of the Patents Act because it is not a person. Further, in determining whether a person had the right to apply for a patent under Section 7(2)(b), there was no rule of law that new intangible property produced by existing tangible property was the property of the owner of the tangible property, and certainly no rule that property in an invention created by a machine was owned by the owner of the machine. This was an appeal by the owner of an artificial intelligence machine against a decision upholding the respondent Comptroller's refusal of his patent applications in respect of inventions generated by the machine.The appellant had submitted two patent applications designating an artificial intelligence machine (DABUS), as the inventor. DABUS stands for "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience", an artificial neural system owned by Dr Thaler. The first invention was entitled "Food Container" and concerned the shape of parts of packaging for food.

One of Wall Street's largest private equity firms, the Blackstone Group, has been making a series of moves that have left mainstream analysts puzzled, with the most recent being Blackstone's hire of David Urban, a Washington lobbyist with close ties to the Trump administration. Blackstone's courting of a Trump ally was not surprising given that the firm's CEO, Steven Schwarzman, recently donated $3 million to Trump's re-election efforts and had previously chaired the President's now-defunct Strategic and Policy Forum of "business leaders" and advisors. The close ties that have developed between Schwarzman and Trump following the latter's election in late 2016 have led mainstream media to describe Schwarzman as a confidant of the President. However, what was odd about Blackstone's hiring of David Urban was its murky reason for doing so, as the firm plans to task Urban with lobbying the Pentagon and State Department on "issues related to military preparedness and training." This is odd, as CNBC noted, because Blackstone "doesn't have any publicly listed government contracts, and its known investments don't appear to have direct links to the defense industry."

LONDON - An American billionaire has given Oxford University £150 million ($188.6 million) for a new institute that will study the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and its vast potential to change society as we know it. The donation from Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone, will also fund a center to house all of the university's humanities subjects in a single space to encourage collaborative study. The idea is to bring together those working on projects that make life worth living with those trying to make sure that the technology of the future works for the interest of society. "AI can be an enormous force for good," Schwarzman told The Associated Press. "But on the downside it can lead to high unemployment. It could destabilize society if it happens too fast."

Murphy: I believe that it is the number one least explored topic because it is not "sexy." When you read media columns, they spend significantly more time discussing machine learning than they do about the mountain of technology that will never get cleaned up and is degrading every day. Unfortunately, that mountain prevents organizations from innovating because it blocks their ability to take artificial intelligence [AI] or machine-learning and apply it to their business. These larger companies have massive built-in advantages, such as customers and network effects that should typically make startups irrelevant. However, they have done a poor job of cleaning up the anchor of their technical systems, organizational systems, and old processes that should have been updated.

TaskUs, the business process outsourcing service that moderates content, annotates information and handles back office customer support for some of the world's largest tech companies, has raised $250 million in an investment from funds managed by the New York-based private equity giant, Blackstone Group. It's been ten years since TaskUs was founded with a $20,000 investment from its two co-founders, and the new deal, which values the decade-old company at $500 million before the money even comes in, is proof of how much has changed for the service in the years since it was founded. The Santa Monica-based company, which began as a browser-based virtual assistant company -- "You send us a task and we get the task done," recalled TaskUs chief executive Bryce Maddock -- is now one of the main providers in the growing field of content moderation for social networks and content annotation for training the algorithms that power artificial intelligence services around the world. "What I can tell you is we do content moderation for almost every major social network and it's the fastest growing part of our business today," Maddock said. From a network of offices spanning the globe from Mexico to Taiwan and the Philippines to the U.S., the thirty two year-old co-founders Maddock and Jaspar Weir have created a business that's largest growth stems from snuffing out the distribution of snuff films; child pornography; inappropriate political content and the trails of human trafficking from the user and advertiser generated content on some of the world's largest social networks.

Cylance, an Irvine-based cybersecurity firm, continues to secure big bucks from investors, this time raising $120 million to fund global expansion, sales and development efforts. Blackstone Tactical Opportunities led the funding round with other investors, according to Cylance's announcement Tuesday, June 19. Cylance uses artificial intelligence to predict cyberattacks on computer networks. Since its debut in 2012, the company has secured millions from investors who believe in the company's algorithmic technology. In 2017, the company reported $100 million in revenue, a first for the startup.

June was kind to macro hedge funds. They were up more than 3 per cent, in what was their best month since 2010, according to data from Hedge Fund Research, buoyed by long positions on the yen and -- for the most fortunate -- long on both the yen and the dollar, and short sterling. Currencies and currency-related trades have been among the few bright spots for hedge funds recently (along with gold, which has risen more than 30 per cent since the end of 2015, according to Credit Suisse). Riding the yen and dollar up and taking on derivative trades, such as shorting Chinese companies that have lots of US dollar debt and dollar costs, have been among the few clear trends to follow. But generally, these are challenging times for the industry both in the short and longer term.

"If you can't beat them, join them" may not sound like the most encouraging pitch for a cybersecurity company, but a startup called Cylance has created an artificial intelligence-powered brain that essentially does just that, and it has taken off -- raising 100 million in a Series D round of funding and catapulting itself into the so-called'unicorn' club of companies with 1 billion valuations. The Series D round of funding was led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, along with existing investors (unnamed which but previous backers include strategics like Capital One, Dell Ventures, DFJ, Fairhaven, Khosla, KKR and Ten Eleven). It takes the total raised to over 177 million. Cylance is not disclosing its valuation but a reliable source close to the company says it's in the neighborhood of 1 billion -- a figure also reported by the FT. Founded and led by Stuart McClure, a serial entrepreneur and former CTO of Intel's McAfee, Cylance's system is part of the rising wave of companies -- including biggies like IBM's Watson and Google's Brain -- that use machine learning and AI to build services that replicate or enhance human thinking to solve more complex problems that might be too challenging or cost prohibitive for a person (or even an army of people) to solve.