A group of current and former employees at leading AI companies OpenAI and Google DeepMind published a letter on Tuesday warning against the dangers of advanced AI as they allege companies are prioritizing financial gains while avoiding oversight. Thirteen employees, eleven of which are current or former employees of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, signed the letter entitled: "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence." The two other signatories are current and former employees of Google DeepMind. The coalition cautions that AI systems are powerful enough to pose serious harms without proper regulation. "These risks range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction," the letter says.

Last Thanksgiving, Brian Israel found himself being asked the same question again and again. The general counsel at the AI lab Anthropic had been watching dumbfounded along with the rest of the tech world as, just two miles south of Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, its main competitor OpenAI seemed to be imploding. OpenAI's board had fired CEO Sam Altman, saying he had lost their confidence, in a move that seemed likely to tank the startup's 80 billion-plus valuation. The firing was only possible thanks to OpenAI's strange corporate structure, in which its directors have no fiduciary duty to increase profits for shareholders--a structure Altman himself had helped design so that OpenAI could build powerful AI insulated from perverse market incentives. To many, it appeared that plan had badly backfired.

Jenna Butler is an adjunct professor at Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA, in the radiation therapy department and is a senior applied research scientist at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA. Catherine Yeh is a senior at Williams College, Williamson, MA, USA, where she studies computer science and cognitive science.

When it comes to the long-promised mass adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), many have been left wondering what exactly is holding up progress. On one hand, AI is expected to have a $13 trillion impact on the global economy by the end of the next decade. On the other, 77.1% of companies report that business adoption of AI initiatives remains a major challenge. Part of the problem is thought leaders, the media and even the public are talking about AI fervently, not pragmatically. As futurist Martin Ford writes in the introduction to his new book on the subject, Architects of Intelligence, "The result has been a sometimes incomprehensible mixture of careful, evidence-based analysis, together with hype, speculation and what might be characterized as outright fear-mongering."

Where will I wear this? Stitch Fix, a popular online subscription and personal shopping service, promises to spare its customers from the drama of shopping by matching each person with a personal stylist who selects clothing and accessories based on the individual's size, style and budget. How can a stylist, who does not personally know you, manage to successfully curate your wardrobe? The secret sauce is the algorithms, which are at the core of the company's business model and do everything from drive the clothing selections to assign human stylists to optimize production and logistics. As a personal style service "that evolves with your tastes, needs and lifestyle," Stitch Fix benefits from algorithms on a daily, customer-by-customer basis.

To Stitch Fix's "hybrid design" tool, fashion design is a puzzle work of 30 to 80 pieces. On the website of online personal shopping service Stitch Fix, the company features a customer review that reads, "I love that my stylist listens to my feedback. The personal note included in my Fix shows how much pride she takes in serving each client." Stitch Fix's personal stylist is the best of its kind. Indeed, few stylists in the industry has achieved the same level of success at outfit pairing and shopping recommendation.

Traditional clothing designers might start the creative process with mood boards and sketches, but Hybrid Designs starts with AI. The in-house brand of subscription fashion startup Stitch Fix, Hybrid Designs employs a data science team that works with the company's order data to predict which clothes customers will want to wear. The team identifies viable gaps in the company's inventory--clothes that people would buy but a designer hasn't made yet, says Stitch Fix chief algorithm officer Eric Colson. "If we could be accurate enough to buy and hold inventory, could we be accurate in what isn't available to buy, what doesn't exist?" "Now when something is ostensibly missing from the market, we fill it in with our own algorithmically generated designs." It works like this: A collection of three algorithms generate a starting point.

Professional stylists do the job for them and the personal shopping service ships the new clothes to their door. That combo is behind the success at Stitch Fix, a San Francisco-based online subscription and shopping service founded in 2011. "I think it's the single most salient aspect of our company," said Eric Colson, chief algorithms officer at Stitch Fix. "Our business is getting relevant things into the hands of our customers. This is the one thing we're going to be best in the world at. We couldn't do this with machines alone. We couldn't do this with humans alone. We're just trying to get them to combine their powers."

At least, that could be the case if the fashionista is a customer of one of several services that offer fashion delivered on demand, such as San Francisco-based startup Stitch Fix. Using data analysis software and machine learning to match users with personalized clothing choices, Stitch Fix is ushering the fashion industry into the age of Big Data. For customers who don't pry too closely into the startup's inner workings, the service is intended to feel like magic. "All they're seeing is they order a box of clothes, and presto -- it appears," said Eric Colson, Stitch Fix's chief algorithms officer. Companies in a variety of industries are relying more heavily on data to provide personalized recommendations -- think Netflix using algorithms to find movies or TV shows users might like, or Amazon suggesting additional purchases based on what's in someone's cart.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, companies are going to great lengths to understand human behavior. Between virtual assistants and platforms that predict our needs, humans barely have to lift a finger to get what they need done. One person who has seriously contributed to building out products that streamline our life is Eric Colson. At Innovate! and Celebrate 2016 in September, you'll have the chance to hear him speak about everything from machine learning to shopping. Eric Colston is currently the chief algorithm officer at Stitch Fix, a women's clothing retail website that prides itself on providing personalized shopping experiences to everyone that click on their link.