In Spain, the Madrid Metro uses AI to monitor its network and reduce energy consumption by 25%. In the U.S., a beverage company uses AI to drive sales by analyzing retailers and markets. In Europe, an energy company trains its engineers and managers in a digital twin factory powered by AI. In the Middle East, a telco's AI-powered virtual assistant speaks to 1.65 million customers every month in different Arab dialects and English. Undoubtedly, AI is in full adoption around the world, with all industries recognizing it as the next big thing in tech.

The chief of the United Kingdom's foreign spy service warns that China and Russia were racing to master artificial intelligence in a way that could revolutionise geopolitics over the next 10 years. The world's spies are trying to grapple with seismic advances in technology that are challenging traditional human-led spying operations, which have dominated espionage for thousands of years. Richard Moore, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, said quantum engineering, engineered biology, vast troves of data and advances in computer power posed a threat that needed to be addressed by the West. "Our adversaries are pouring money and ambition into mastering artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology, because they know that mastering these technologies will give them leverage," Moore, who rarely makes public speeches, will say on Tuesday, according to the Reuters news agency. Moore, a former diplomat who became MI6 chief in 2020, said technological progress over the next decade could outstrip all tech progress over the past century.

Singapore will adopt a human-centric approach to AI, and focus on the use of the technology to deliver impactful social and economic benefits for its citizens. The government has initially identified five key sectors: Transport and Logistics, Smart Cities and Estates, Healthcare, Education, Safety, and Border Security (about 300,000 people cross the border with Malaysia daily). The city-state of Singapore was the recipient of the Smart City award in 2018. The vast array of solutions developed by the government from dynamic public bus routing algorithms to real-time parent-teacher portals, or even predictive analytics for water pipe leaks, have proved that Singapore systematically pursues the application of innovative digital technologies to improve people's lives. "We believe that AI is a transformative technology. The fact that computers and systems can now see, hear, understand, and speak, is transformational. It will transform our economy and societies, and disrupt our politics. It will alter the nature of jobs, and the skills our people will need." said Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, who is also Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Programme Office, during the Smart City Expo World Congress opening ceremony.

Singapore, ranked the smartest city in the world in certain polls, has warned cities they must get a handle on artificial intelligence (AI) if they are to succeed as'smart cities', trusted by citizens and enterprises to manage data correctly. The warning came at Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona today (November 19), as Singapore, awarded city of the year at the 2018 show, shared the stage with local politicians from Barcelona and Madrid at the 2019 kick-off. Vivian Balakrishnan, minister for foreign affairs for the government of Singapore, set out Singapore's own AI strategy, as a geographically-constrained but tech-savvy city state. "This technology will change the world, and cities that master AI will get ahead -- those that don't will be left behind," he said. "The fact computers and systems can now see hear, speak and understand is transformational. It will transform our economy, disrupt our politics, alter the nature of our jobs -- and it will define the next phase of our'smart nation' journey."

If you've been thinking about trying to learn deep learning, here's a new software library that promises to make things easy. Fast.ai, a startup co-founded by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard, a professor and research scientist both working at the University of San Francisco, have released a free open source framework that works on top of PyTorch. Known as fastai (without a dot), it's aimed at budding coders that have some experience with Python. It includes some of the most popular algorithms for image classification and natural language tasks so that models can be quickly built and run in just few lines of code. No other library that we know of provides such an easy way to leverage Nvidia's latest technology, which gives two to three times better performance compared to previous approaches," the startup announced on Tuesday. Fast.ai is known for its free deep learning introductory courses that have been completed by people that don't necessarily have technical backgrounds. "Our goal is to get to a point where we don't need to teach courses any more - where we've made deep learning so easy to use, that anyone can use it (and get world-class results) without needing to take a course," Howard told The Register. "The only way to get there is for us to write software that makes deep learning easier.

For the past few months, Huawei has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons -- the US government warned against buying the company's phones, which led to the breakdown of near-final deals with AT&T and Verizon. Then Best Buy, one of its few US retail partners, backed away too. We're not sure if the concerns hold any weight, but one thing is clear: It sucks to be Huawei right now. And in the midst of that turmoil, Huawei revealed its new P20 Pro, a remarkably well-built device with a triple camera system and loads of style. I doubt that would ever win over a Sinophobic bureaucrat though, so there's a strong chance no one in the US will ever be able to walk into a store and buy one.

The recent excitement about AI is undeniable. In every industry there is room for AI to shine and bring tremendous value, and we now believe that the technology has evolved enough to deliver. The number of startups working on this space (or at least claiming to) is massive and the amount of noise is equally daunting. Mark Cuban has recently made a statement claiming that the world's first trillionaire will be someone who masters AI. My biggest point of disagreement with that statement is with the word "someone".

A heated debate is currently underway within the scientific community about AI, with some claiming that it can be used to benefit humanity, while others claim it could lead to the end of modern civilisation. South African businessman and SpaceX leader Elon Musk has been one of the more outspoken critics of AI, describing it as the "biggest risk we face as a civilisation." Others, however, have said that it will be a positive, with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg saying that "If you're arguing against AI, then you're arguing against safer cars that aren't going to have accidents. I just don't see how, in good conscience, some people can do that." However, as President Putin wades into the debate, experts will surely be worried following his ominous warning.

Some tasks are just too complex, too nuanced to tackle all at once, like beating all 256 levels of Ms. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 while earning a perfect score of 999,990. That's why Microsoft didn't even try to train its AI to take it on in one go. Instead the company, as it announced on Wednesday, split this monumental challenge up into smaller, chomp-sized pieces and trained a hivemind of 150 AIs to accomplish it as a team. Developed by Maluuba, a Canadian AI firm that Microsoft recently acquired, the AI system relies on reinforcement learning to develop its strategy. Reinforcement learning is an AI training technique wherein the algorithm is rewarded for using more efficient outcomes and dissuaded from using the less effective based on previously observed outcomes.

One of China's biggest tech companies, Tencent, is establishing an AI research lab in Seattle, demonstrating a growing determination to master a technology that looks set to define the future of many industries. Tencent is already one of China's dominant tech companies. It operates the hugely successful mobile chat app WeChat--which boasts over 889 million active users in China--along with lots of other social tools, e-commerce services, games, and the like. Based in Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub in the southeastern part of the country, Tencent has the potential to become a key player in the development and commercialization of artificial intelligence. The company has the money, the reach, and the data to attract strong researchers.