I've been trying to disentangle my online life from Google for a while. And as someone who wrote about Android professionally for years, it hasn't been easy. I've ditched Chrome, but I still use a Samsung Galaxy phone and Google Pixel Watch, for example. But when I finally got off the big daddy, Google Search, and switched to DuckDuckGo, it had a surprising effect: Google got better. That's a broad statement, so let me be more particular right away.

Are you smarter than artificial intelligence? A new study finds one revolutionary program is putting human intellect to shame. Researchers from UCLA have found that the autoregressive language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) clearly outperforms the average college student in a series of reasoning tests that measure intelligence. The program uses deep learning to produce human-like text. GPT-3, a technology created by OpenAI, has a host of applications, including language translation and generating text for applications such as chatbots.

Throughout the last few weeks, I have been trying to answer one burning question. Some of the answers that I have discovered were as a way to train artificial intelligence models for real-world use. Which is an interesting use case…but boring. At this moment, there is no clear winner of the Metaverse. What does that even mean?

Last month, physicists at Toronto-based startup Xanadu published a curious experiment in Nature in which they generated seemingly random numbers. During the pandemic, they built a tabletop machine named Borealis, consisting of lasers, mirrors, and over a kilometer of optical fiber. Within Borealis, 216 beams of infrared light bounced around through a complicated network of prisms. Then, a series of detectors counted the number of photons in each beam after they traversed the prisms. Ultimately, the machine generated 216 numbers at a time--one number corresponding to the photon count in each respective beam.

One of us even yelled. After a long night of going through our list of finalists, our editors have finally settled on our winners for the official Best of CES awards. Below is our list of winners for each category, including our Best of the Best and our People's Choice winner too. Whill's Model M is an electric wheelchair meant to boost mobility for people with disabilities. Powered wheelchairs have been around for decades, but this new version from Whill has a compact, sturdy design that allows people to move across different surfaces independently.

As Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Baidu take turns leapfrogging each other in artificial intelligence innovation, one company stands to profit from any outcome: Nvidia. Graphics processor units, the company's biggest moneymaker, have become the industry standard for deep learning, a flavor of artificial intelligence widely used by tech companies to build personal virtual assistants, image recognition for tagging photos, and even the software behind self-driving cars. Despite talks from Microsoft and Google about developing their own proprietary chips, almost every major tech company is partnered up with Nvidia and uses its hardware. Last month, Microsoft announced a partnership to work with Nvidia's AI-tailored DGX-1 supercomputer, and Google's recently revamped cloud services will offer the option to run on Nvidia GPUs in 2017. Facebook's open-source Big Sur design for their server racks also rely on Nvidia hardware.

Do you believe the warnings from folks like Prof. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others? Is AI the greatest tool humanity will ever create, or are we "summoning the demon"? To quote the head of AI at Singularity University, Neil Jacobstein, "It's not artificial intelligence I'm worried about, it's human stupidity." In a recent Abundance 360 webinar, I interviewed Bryan Johnson, the founder of a new company called Kernel which he seeded with $100 million. To quote Bryan, "It's not about AI vs. humans. In 2007, he founded Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider. In 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million. In 2014, Bryan launched the OS Fund with $100 million of his personal capital to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. His investments include endeavors to cure age-related diseases and radically extend healthy human life to 100 (Human Longevity Inc.), replicate the human visual cortex using ...