That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. The past few months have demonstrated how AI can bring us together. Meta released a model that can translate speech from more than 100 languages, and people across the world are finding solace, assistance, and even romance with chatbots. However, it's also abundantly clear how the technology is dividing us--for example, the Pentagon is using AI to detect humans on its "kill list." Elsewhere, the changes Mark Zuckerberg has made to his social media company's guidelines mean that hate speech is likely to become far more prevalent on our timelines.

Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones's channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers. And YouTube's recommendation algorithm, which accounted for the majority of what people watched on the platform, looked to be pulling people deeper and deeper into dangerous delusions. The process of "falling down the rabbit hole" was memorably illustrated by personal accounts of people who had ended up on strange paths into the dark heart of the platform, where they were intrigued and then convinced by extremist rhetoric--an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men's rights and then white supremacy and then calls for violence. Most troubling is that a person who was not necessarily looking for extreme content could end up watching it because the algorithm noticed a whisper of something in their previous choices.

Tech leaders and AI experts on Tuesday warned that the U.S. military needs to move quickly to harness its military data and invest in emerging technology if it wants to compete with the Chinese in an era when artificial intelligence is upending global conflict. "The country that is able to most rapidly and effectively integrate new technology into war-fighting wins," Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, told lawmakers on a House Armed Services subcommittee. China is spending three times more than the U.S. on developing AI tools, Wang noted. "The Chinese Communist Party deeply understands the potential for AI to disrupt warfare, and is investing heavily to capitalize," he said. "AI is China's Apollo project."

On Monday, as Americans considered the possibility of a Donald Trump indictment and a presidential perp walk, Eliot Higgins brought the hypothetical to life. Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open-source investigations group, asked the latest version of the generative-AI art tool Midjourney to illustrate the spectacle of a Trump arrest. It pumped out vivid photos of a sea of police officers dragging the 45th president to the ground. He generated a series of images that became more and more absurd: Donald Trump Jr. and Melania Trump screaming at a throng of arresting officers; Trump weeping in the courtroom, pumping iron with his fellow prisoners, mopping a jailhouse latrine, and eventually breaking out of prison through a sewer on a rainy evening. The story, which Higgins tweeted over the course of two days, ends with Trump crying at a McDonald's in his orange jumpsuit. All of the tweets are compelling, but only the scene of Trump's arrest went mega viral, garnering 5.7 million views as of this morning.

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.

He finds ridiculous that some think "superintelligence itself is impossible." The author is astonishingly wrong in thinking computers can equal and surpass humans in mental performance. He seems unaware of limitations of AI as mathematically argued by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose decades ago in "The Emperor's New Mind." Or Searle's Chinese room argument that convincingly demonstrates computers, and thus AI, will never understand what they do. Or Selmer Bringsjord's Lovelace test that a computer must pass to demonstrate creativity.

In a new report released on October 27 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), more than 42% of all technology areas in 2018 incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their new inventions. The majority of these improvements come in knowledge processing and planning/control, which involve analyzing information to gain new insights and using those insights to manage a business process. CIOs continue to talk about how vital AI technologies are, but this new report confirms that if companies aren't already putting that talk into action, they are behind the curve. The danger of falling behind is even greater for companies that haven't started adoption since the statistics only cover till the end of 2018. In the last 18 months, the percentage of technologies that include AI has undoubtedly continued to increase. The report also confirms an increased interest by the office in this technology and a higher willingness to consider new applications that include them.

No matter what industry you operate in, you'll have noticed by now that technology is changing the way we do business. Technology continues to evolve, and businesses need to keep up or risk becoming obsolete. Companies that continue to practice traditional business methods will find it more difficult to stay relevant and competitive. If they overlook the significance of digital transformation, they face an imminent threat of being outsmarted by more innovative players in the game. The day is coming when digital transformation will mean the difference between survival, and the ability to thrive in this technology-driven world.

Me: "I love you, Siri." Siri: "You are the wind beneath my wings." Anyone else had that "conversation" with your iPhone? We're amused, and even a little amazed, at how "she" responds to us. We ask Alexa to turn down the lights in the living room.

Embedded Computing Design recently conducted targeted industry research on the prevalence of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the development community. Much to our surprise, more than 75 percent of the respondents are already researching or using AI in one capacity or another. Now, AI and machine learning are not new, and the questions didn't specify whether respondents were indicating the use of time-honored techniques like principle component analysis, decision trees, etc. On the other hand, modern AI/ML is becoming synonymous with neural networking, so I took the results at face value. One important note, however, is that the respondents were evenly distributed geographically.