The AI talent grab is real. This year alone, Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski jumped ship to Airbnb, while Pinterest hired Walmart CTO Jeremy King to head up its engineering team. Moreover, all the big tech companies, including Google and Apple, have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions -- a recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple with 20 acquisitions. Elsewhere, Microsoft turned to online education platforms to help train a new generation of AI students. But while the AI talent pool may be growing, a significant shortage remains.

One of the things I've always wanted from technology is the ability to point my phone at something or take a screenshot, and have it say, here's what that thing is and here's where you can buy it. Well, my lavish consumerist dream is starting to come true, and Grokstyle is one company working to make it so -- in this case, automatically identifying furniture and home decor from just about any picture or angle. The basic idea is this: you open an app or web interface, and upload or take a picture of, say, a chair or lamp you like. The Grokstyle service immediately returns the closest matches, either including the object itself or ones very like it. That would of course be very handy for any interior decorator, but ordinary shoppers can make it work, too.

One of the things I've always wanted from technology is the ability to point my phone at something or take a screenshot, and have it say, here's what that thing is and here's where you can buy it. Well, my lavish consumerist dream is starting to come true, and Grokstyle is one company working to make it so -- in this case, automatically identifying furniture and home decor from just about any picture or angle. The basic idea is this: you open an app or web interface, and upload or take a picture of, say, a chair or lamp you like. The Grokstyle service immediately returns the closest matches, either including the object itself or ones very like it. That would of course be very handy for any interior decorator, but ordinary shoppers can make it work, too.