The first video shows a man who thinks he's talking to a woman (bottom right corner) but is actually talking to a man (top left corner) and the second videos is deepfake demo. New generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have captivated the world's imagination with promise and potential. AI's ability to analyze vast amounts of data and make autonomous decisions is a source of both awe and anxiety. People worry about bias in decision-making, the invasion of privacy, job displacement, and even the existential fear of machines becoming uncontrollable. How can we make sure AI benefits society? The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has responded by seeking input on how to ensure that AI companies are "accountable."

What is the state of innovation in embedded vision? While deep learning remains a dominant force, deep neural networks alone don't make a product. Presented as a virtual event in May, the Embedded Vision Summit examined the latest developments in practical computer vision and AI edge processing. In my role as the summit's general chair, I reviewed more than 300 great session proposals for the conference. Here are the trends I'm seeing in the embedded-vision space.

In July, Uber released a new open source AI library called the Plato research dialogue system. Why are so many new libraries being announced? There seems to be a trend of developers adopting open source conversational AI and leaving behind closed-source alternatives. Most of the key tooling for building conversational AI that has been developed in the last three years is open source. And companies like Uber and Cisco want to be in the running to define the standard conversational AI stack.

The history of science and technology is often delineated by paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in how we view the world and our relationship to it. The big paradigm shifts are sometimes even referred to as an "age" or a "revolution". The Space Age is a perfect example. The middle of the 20th Century saw not only an incredible increase in public awareness of space and space travel, but many of the industrial and technical advances that we now take for granted were byproducts of the Space Age.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) got an early start in smart speakers with its Echo devices, but Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google is catching up quickly. Last year, Amazon took the lion's share of the market with Google a distant second in terms of sales. But during the first quarter this year, the sales between the two companies are much closer, with at least one research group indicating Google may have sold more devices than Amazon. This article originally appeared in The Motley Fool. Google sold 3.2 million Home devices in the first quarter, according to Canalys, more than the 2.5 million it estimates for Amazon.