DeepMind's new model, Gato, has sparked a debate on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is nearer–almost at hand–just a matter of scale. Gato is a model that can solve multiple unrelated problems: it can play a large number of different games, label images, chat, operate a robot, and more. Not so many years ago, one problem with AI was that AI systems were only good at one thing. After IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess, it was easy to say "But the ability to play chess isn't really what we mean by intelligence." A model that plays chess can't also play space wars.

Although Fernanda De La Torre still has several years left in her graduate studies, she's already dreaming big when it comes to what the future has in store for her. "I dream of opening up a school one day where I could bring this world of understanding of cognition and perception into places that would never have contact with this," she says. It's that kind of ambitious thinking that's gotten De La Torre, a doctoral student in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, to this point. A recent recipient of the prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, De La Torre has found at MIT a supportive, creative research environment that's allowed her to delve into the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence. But she's still driven by an innate curiosity about human imagination and a desire to bring that knowledge to the communities in which she grew up.

A few months ago, during my last year of engineering studies, I was handed the opportunity to start a small AI driven project. It sounded hugely interesting, so I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. At this point in time, the biology department of Vrije Universiteit Brussel was doing tests with different kind of bacteria in petri dishes (please do not ask me which or why, although they tried to explain it multiple times, I seemed to have not exactly the strongest understanding capabilities in biology). The main idea of the test was to contaminate some petri dish with a bacteria, and observe how fast new cell colonies would form, thus counting the amount of cell colonies in a petri dish. This was done by hand, counting each colony and putting a blue dot above it so they would remember which was already counted.

You may have heard of the metaverse -- but let's be honest: do you really know what that means? If you're unsure, you're not alone: The metaverse is hard to pinpoint. It doesn't even have a definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Cathy Hackl, tells Freethink. A "Chief Metaverse Officer," Hackl is a professionally trained futurist and strategist, who has worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Magic Leap, and HTC VIVE, and helps brands understand how this new paradigm will affect their businesses. If you think of Web 1.0 as the internet that connected us to information, and Web 2.0 as the social-media iteration, which connects people, Web 3.0 (which we're now entering) is connecting people, places, and things, says Hackl. "Sometimes, these people, places, and things can be in a fully virtual or synthetic environment, or they could be in a physical world with some level of augmentation," she said.

In today's episode of Future Tech, I want to give you 10 reasons how robots could make our lives easier and better. Now we've seen a lot of science fiction movies over the years like Star Wars with C Threepio and R2D2 And how those robots helped Luke, Leia and Han and Chewie, and we've seen iRobot where the robots took over the world or Terminator where the machines took over the world and started killing all the humans. But they don't always show us how robots could be helping us. There's a really good movie and book by Isaac Asimov called Bicentennial Man which I really enjoyed. The movie stars Robin Williams, and it shows you how a robot could actually help a family.

I remember coming across a beautiful poster, folded and inserted inside a National Geographic magazine. It was titled "Hidden Water," and contained various measurements of how much water it takes to produce different things. The poster said that it requires 2,900 gallons of water to make one pair of blue jeans and estimated the water cost of one cotton t-shirt at 766 gallons. It was my first exposure to "the truth" behind the fashion industry. The second time came when I watched "The True Cost."

Superintelligence: What happens in a world with AI that is hundreds or thousands of times smarter than humans? In this episode, we chat with research scientist Roman Yampolskiy. He's a professor at the University of Louisville, and his most recent book is Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach. Subscribe wherever you find podcasts: If you listen to podcasts, here's where you can subscribe to future39 and here more interviews like this on the future. What happens in a world with AI that's hundreds or thousands of times smarter than we are? He's a professor at the University of Louisville, and his most recent book is Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach. John Koetsier: Thank you so much for coming on the show. You have an amazing background there, I love it.

AI is better than humans in a lot of things. What size is the cylinder that is left of the brown metal thing that is left of the big sphere? Any 6-year-old could answer this pretty easily, yet these kinds of questions are just out of the scope of traditional deep learning models. Deep learning models are pretty good at understanding relationships between inputs and outputs, but that's about as far as it goes. Whether it's supervised learning or reinforcement learning, the input and desired output are clearly defined and easy for the model to understand.

There are a lot of different legal issues businesses need to deal with when considering implementing artificial intelligence (AI) including intellectual property rights, privacy and civil liability concerns. Artificial intelligence is the use of technology to replace human thought, explained Adam Allouba, partner at Dentons. AI runs on data which is used to train algorithms and intellectual property is the idea of the ownership in a database or a compilation of data. "You've really got to think about'do I have the rights for the data I'm using?'… It's very important to think those things through because if you don't your whole system might be trained on something that is not compliant with law which could open the door to lawsuits."

At first blush, creating better leads for companies that sell things to other companies may not seem like a big deal in a social sense, but I think it really is. They are really people, people trying to do things. In a lot of cases, they have built really great products, really great services, and yet they fail. I think one of the big reasons they fail is they just have not been able to connect with the market. It could be that they failed to get product market fit right, that they built the wrong solution. I think a lot of times, they've built a great solution, but they just don't have sales capabilities, or marketing capabilities. They don't have that little bit of luck to find those first important customers who are going to pay the bills and help them prove that what they have really works in the marketplace.