Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried? Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.

It's been almost one year since the Covid-19 pandemic started. Data scientists worldwide have been analyzing data gathered during the pandemic to inform policies. As we have seen, policymaking has not been straight forward. During this time of social isolation, it's been a great opportunity for policymakers to figure out the right approach to making sense of the data to gain flexibility in community-based policy decisions. On Nov 17th, 2020, XPrize and Cognizant announced their Pandemic Response Challenge.

The science of applied artificial intelligence doesn't get the same kinds of headlines as the pure research efforts of Google or Facebook or others. Mostly that's because what gets built by companies is obfuscated by those same companies, either for proprietary reasons or because the companies actually have nothing much to speak of. Last week, Babak Hodjat, who runs the machine learning operations of software giant Cognizant Technology Solutions, had something to show, so ZDNet traveled to the loft office near San Francisco's Embarcadero where Hodjat and a team of 18 staffers develop algorithms. The ostensible event was the publication, on the arXiv pre-print server, of a paper showing how Hodjat's style of machine learning could compete with the kind made famous by DeepMind's AlphaZero. Before digging into the paper, ZDNet accepted a challenge against the machine, a game of Flappy Bird.

Today's podcast features recent interviews with [two] experts in top AI management positions discussing recent developments within their companies and the overall sector: Dr. Danny Rittman, CTO of GBT Technologies Inc. (OTC PINK:GTCH), and Mr. Babak Hodjat, VP of Evolutionary AI, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (NasdaqGS:CTSH). Listen to the podcast interview with Dr. Danny Rittman, CTO of GBT Technologies Inc. (OTC PINK:GTCH) discussing the company's recently announced implementation and development of recurrent relational reasoning (RRN) in its AI, and its applications in the medical field. In a recently published press release, GBT Technologies CTO, Dr. Danny Rittman explained the company's rationale for incorporating recurrent relational reasoning (RRN) into its Avant! "Our goal is to implement a fundamental part of human intelligence called relational reasoning, which is planned to enable Avant! to acquire expertise on its own by understanding object's relations. Avant! will include an advanced artificial neural network (ANN) capable of pattern recognition and reasoning about those patterns which is very similar to the human brain."

"Deep learning is neither deep, nor is it learning," says Babak Hodjat, the vice president of projects for "Evolutionary AI" at IT services giant Cognizant Technologies. Hodjat's critique is part of a fascinating exploration of AI taking shape at IT services firm Cognizant Technology Solutions, a twenty-five-year-old company based in Teaneck, New Jersey that last year made nearly $16 billion in revenue serving some of the biggest companies in the world. For years, this IT giant has talked about "digital transformation," something that is large and significant but also something hard to get one's mind around because it very often seems vague and undefined. And then in December, Cognizant gave a whole new grounding and precision to that digital work by acquiring certain assets from an eleven-year-old AI startup Sentient Technologies. The company, co-founded by Hodjat, has been pursuing a thrilling line of work in what's called "evolutionary computation," where many algorithms, including conventional artificial neural networks, can be tested in parallel for "fitness," to select an optimal network to perform a task.

Last week, Ben Goertzel and his company, Aidyia, turned on a hedge fund that makes all stock trades using artificial intelligence--no human intervention required. "If we all die," says Goertzel, a longtime AI guru and the company's chief scientist, "it would keep trading." Goertzel and other humans built the system, of course, and they'll continue to modify it as needed. But their creation identifies and executes trades entirely on its own, drawing on multiple forms of AI, including one inspired by genetic evolution and another based on probabilistic logic. Each day, after analyzing everything from market prices and volumes to macroeconomic data and corporate accounting documents, these AI engines make their own market predictions and then "vote" on the best course of action. If we all die, it would keep trading.

Talk of mass job losses and the need to give humans a computer layer in their brain as a result of artificial intelligence (AI), an idea put forward by billionaire Elon Musk, are "alarmist" and distract from the good being done by the technology, a top start-up CEO told CNBC on Thursday. Major warnings have been issued by technologists about the impact of AI on society in the next few years. For example, Alibaba founder Jack Ma said society could face decades of "pain" from the result of automation, while Musk has started a company called Neuralink to research the development of human-machine interfaces. Babak Hodjat, the CEO of Sentient Technologies, one of the world's highest-funded AI start-ups, however, said that such developments were still in the realm of science fiction and in fact are distracting companies from developing world-changing solutions. "We are nowhere near that on the technology side, and it's distracting to the fact that AI today can help the world in so many places, and the discourse is being taken over by folks that are alarmists, around something that might happen in 100 years, 150 years," Hodjat told CNBC during an interview at the Pioneers tech show in Vienna on Thursday.

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."