AI'godmother' Fei-Fei Li says she is'proud to be different' The'godmother' of AI, Professor Fei-Fei Li has told the BBC that being the only woman amongst seven pioneers of artificial Intelligence being presented with a top engineering prize by the King today makes her proud to be different. The King will present the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering to Prof Li and six others during a ceremony at St James's Palace. Those honoured alongside her are Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Prof John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun. They are being recognised for their contributions to the development of modern machine learning, a field that underpins the rapid advancement of AI. Who are the Godparents of AI? Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and Yann LeCun, currently Chief AI Scientist at Meta have widely been recognised as the Godfathers of AI since they were jointly awarded the 2018 Turing Award.

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter's back. In fact, Li--who earned the sobriquet the "godmother of AI"--is betting on the contrary. She's on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It's an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on the funding fast track.

This article is part of New York's Future Issue, a collection of predictions about the near future as seen through the recent past. Click here to read more. On June 21, 2017, electronic musician Holly Herndon and her husband, writer/philosopher/teacher Mat Dryhurst, welcomed a new addition to their family. "She's an inhuman child," Herndon tells me one afternoon, while seated in the offices of her record label, 4AD. Spawn is nascent machine intelligence, or AI. There's artificial intelligence being deployed for self-driving 18-wheelers, Netflix user-preference predictors, customer service preferences, handwriting recognition, and cyber-security to fight hackers using AI to create malware.

New ships, new destinations, unusual activities and some extraordinary bargains are part of the cruising buzz for summer and fall. New thrill attractions: Thrills have become a cruise ship staple, and on the world's newest, largest ship, Royal Caribbean's 5,500-passenger Harmony of the Seas, the rush comes courtesy of the Ultimate Abyss. Beginning later this month, daring riders can zoom on mats from the top of the ship to the Boardwalk neighborhood about 100 feet below. Posh gets posher: Regent Seven Seas Cruises is billing its 750-passenger Seven Seas Explorer, launching in July, as the "world's most luxurious cruise ship." The top digs are a 3,785-square-foot suite, with a first-at-sea private spa (serviced by the ship's Canyon Ranch SpaClub) and a price tag of 5,000 per person per night, based on double occupancy.