SoftBank Group saw its operating income increase by 81% over the year to March 31, 2019, driven by its SoftBank Vision and Delta Funds more than tripling their operating income. Here's how it's related to artificial intelligence, how it works and why it matters. Overall, the SoftBank conglomerate took in ¥9.6 trillion in sales, an increase of 5%, from which it made ¥2.35 trillion in earnings before interest and taxes, up 81%, and ¥1.4 trillion of net income. Broken down, both of its telcos in the form of Sprint and SoftBank Corporation contributed around ¥3.7 trillion in sales, with Yahoo Japan making ¥947 billion in sales, and others making up the remaining ¥1.2 trillion. For operating income, the SoftBank Vision Fund hit ¥1.26 trillion, SoftBank made ¥725 billion, Sprint contributed ¥280 billion, and Yahoo Japan made ¥135 billion.

In a May 2016 post to the White House blog, titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence," then-President Barack Obama said: "Today's AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn't anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, AI's influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition. In healthcare, the President's Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot will rely on AI to find patterns in medical data and, ultimately, to help doctors diagnose diseases and suggest treatments to improve patient care and health outcomes. In education, AI has the potential to help teachers customize instruction for each student's needs. And, of course, AI plays a key role in self-driving vehicles, which have the potential to save thousands of lives, as well as in unmanned aircraft systems, which may transform global transportation, logistics systems, and countless industries over the coming decades. Like any transformative technology, however, artificial intelligence carries some risk and presents complex policy challenges along several dimensions, from jobs and the economy to safety and regulatory questions... AI systems can also behave in surprising ways, and we're increasingly relying on AI to advise decisions and operate physical and virtual machinery --adding to the challenge of predicting and controlling how complex technologies will behave."

The Future of Humanity Institute researcher Anders Sandberg has said that we talk about'artificial intelligence' only until it works; thereafter we call it'automation'. How smart, for example, is a computer that can win at chess, Jeopardy, or even Go when it can't extrapolate from its knowledge of those games to tackle something else? Our inner biological supremacists can smugly dismiss those computers as automation. At the beginning of Luke Dormehl's Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It's Taking Us Next, 'computers' are people whose actuarial jobs require them to perform complex calculations. By the end, the scientists he interviews are discussing a future in which computers may be a lot like people.

General Electric (GE), the largest industrial company in the US, says it has developed processes that more than double the speed of innovation and which have the potential to completely restructure its own business. GE will next week launch its first business venture, called Fuse, that will test a hugely ambitious and radical approach to creating new companies through processes and technologies designed to harness the work of global crowds of experts. Dyan Finkhousen is Director of GE's Open Innovation and Advanced Manufacturing group. The GE startup "will usher in what we believe is the future of work," said Dyan Finkhousen, Director of GE's Open Innovation and Advanced Manufacturing group. See also: Emerging technologies to power your systems of insight Obama's report on the future of artificial intelligence: The main takeaways Robot security: Making sure machines don't become the latest big threat She was speaking at Brightidea's Synthesize user conference in San Francisco.