In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he'd be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare: a backyard tour, video games, meet mom. The difference is that Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, has thin electrode-studded wires installed in his brain, which he used to move a computer mouse on a screen, click menus, and play chess. The implant, called N1, was installed last year by neurosurgeons working with Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-interface company. Arbaugh's livestream is an indicator that Neuralink is a whole lot closer to creating a plug-and-play experience that can restore people's daily ability to roam the web and play games, giving them what the company has called "digital freedom." But this is not yet a commercial product.

Even with the advances in the Natural Language Processing field, there have always been nagging doubts about the quality and accuracy of translations from one language to another. Take Google's translation, for example. While it has steadily improved over the years, you still see a few things grammatically wrong with complex sentences. To bridge that gap, Microsoft claims it has developed a system that can translate from Chinese to English with the quality and accuracy of humans. The researchers behind this system developed it by training the model on a set of news stories called newstest2017.