But China could catch up, according to analysts, as AI solutions take years to be perfected. Chinese internet companies "are arguably more advanced than US internet companies, depending on how you're measuring advancement," Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy research at Trivium China tells the BBC.

Over the past year, we have seen the acceleration of technology and science despite the devastation that COVID has had on businesses and many core industries. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have pushed science faster than ever before with the goal of a vaccine that is already rolling out across the nation. With a handful of additional companies already in late stage testing of a vaccine, we may see a return to normalcy in 2021, or rather a new-normal. Reflecting on the past year, we've seen major advancements in AI and ML and how these technologies impact core business planning and operations. Last year, commercial airlines were simply using machine learning tech to predict what passengers would order for lunch, this year ML is featured in the boardroom daily to better understand how to restart business, maximize services, reduce risk in a continuously volatile travel market, and more.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the most transformative technology in the history of mankind--and we may not even see much of this sweeping change coming. That's because we often overestimate what technologies can do in five years, and underestimate what they will be able to do in 20. As I've traveled the world talking about this subject, I'm constantly asked, "what will the future hold for humans and AI?" This is an essential question for this moment in history. Some believe that we're in the midst of an "AI bubble" that will eventually pop, or at least cool off.

Over the past year, we have seen the acceleration of technology and science despite the devastation that COVID has had on businesses and many core industries. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have pushed science faster than ever before with the goal of a vaccine that is already rolling out across the nation. With a handful of additional companies already in late stage testing of a vaccine, we may see a return to normalcy in 2021, or rather a new-normal. Reflecting on the past year, we've seen major advancements in AI and ML and how these technologies impact core business planning and operations. Last year, commercial airlines were simply using machine learning tech to predict what passengers would order for lunch, this year ML is featured in the boardroom daily to better understand how to restart business, maximize services, reduce risk in a continuously volatile travel market, and more.

After the buyer used the weapon to kill his estranged wife and two others, the site successfully invoked Section 230 to avoid liability. More recently, Grindr, a dating app, took cover behind Section 230 when Matthew Herrick, an actor in New York, sued the site as a result of false profiles that were created by an ex-boyfriend. The profiles, which included Herrick's home and work addresses, suggested that Herrick had rape fantasies, and that any resistance he put up was part of the fantasy. As a consequence, hundreds of men showed up at his apartment door or at his workplace, at all hours, month after month, forcibly demanding sex. "You look at that law, and it seems very narrow," Herrick's lawyer, Carrie Goldberg, told me.

Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web. It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70% of internet traffic. Internet activity itself hasn't slowed down. What has changed over the last 4 years is market share of traffic on the Web.

There's currently an ongoing debate about the value of data and whether internet companies should do more to share their data with others. At Google we've long believed that open data and open source are good not only for us and our industry, but also benefit the world at large. Our commitment to open source and open data has led us to share datasets, services and software with everyone. For example, Google released the Open Images dataset of 36.5 million images containing nearly 20,000 categories of human-labeled objects. With this data, computer vision researchers can train image recognition systems.

Hyperscale internet companies have leapfrogged several levels of machine learning with increasing automation in data processing and modeling sophistication since 2015. The enterprise, with a few exceptions, has been lagging in adoption of artificial intelligence but sees, in internet companies, partners who can help it to catch up. The prospective enterprise users of machine learning have a long way to go to match the talent pools, computing prowess, scale, and the data volumes for training algorithms that internet companies have accumulated, especially over the last four years. In many verticals of the enterprise, the business processes have not been digitally transformed for the automation of data processing and the instant execution of business decisions based on insights gained from artificial intelligence. Moreover, several of the verticals do not yet have well-defined use cases that lend themselves to the profitable execution of artificial intelligence.

When I moved to China in 2014 to start my company, the country was still in the slow process of opening up its massive economy and developing its major foreign policy initiative, One Belt One Road. This aims to open up the economy by reviving the old Silk Road trade route, connecting Europe and China by land and sea, at a cost of $4-8 trillion. The impact of China's opening and development can be felt in every industry, especially the start-up and venture capital sectors. In 2014, only two of the world's top 20 internet companies were from China. Today, that number has jumped to nine.

If I wanted to show my distaste for the direction the US is going by boycotting American PC hardware, software and services, could it be done? You could certainly eliminate a lot of American products, but you might be giving up features without getting any ethical benefits. For example, more than a billion people already manage without a lot of American technology because they live in China or Russia. While I share your distaste for the Trump regime, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not exactly choirboys. And while Trump is scapegoating immigrants, more than half of America's top technology companies were co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.