This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31. When last we saw our Star Trek: Discovery antihero--Her Most Imperial Majesty, Mother of the Fatherland, Overlord of Vulcan, Dominus of Qo'noS, Regina Andor, Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius--back in 2020, she had just come through a particularly rough stretch. Georgiou (if you're nasty, and she certainly is) had … well, for starters, she'd been dragged from the fascist "mirror" universe where she was queen into the "prime" one, and then catapulted 930 years into the future to stop an evil A.I. from wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy. Got that done, thankfully, though not without some sassy shenanigans--but all the travel turned out to be a bit taxing, on both Georgiou's mind and molecules, which were straining like a multiversal rubber band to return backward and across, causing weird flashbacks and a nasty case of the decorporealizing shivers. Luckily, a mysterious sentient hard drive known as "the Sphere" that had been hanging out on her ship, the mushroom-fueled USS Discovery, was able to help locate a solution: a stout little man dressed in tweed and a bowler hat named Carl who was also, ahem, the "Guardian of Forever."

A killer robot called M3GAN, Channing Tatum's disobedient dog, Colin Farrell's donkey and a bear addicted to cocaine were among the most colourful characters to emerge on the big screen as audiences returned to cinemas.

For the last five or so years, Qualcomm has bet big on bringing more artificial intelligence to smartphones, laptops, vehicles, smart infrastructure and other devices in the field--or what the company calls the "connected intelligent edge." It's Don McGuire's job to tell Qualcomm's technology and artificial intelligence story in a way that's not scary. Recently, that's been harder to do. Last fall's launch of ChatGPT--a generative AI chatbot that answers prompts with polished essays, poetry, computer code and other human-like content--has thrust artificial intelligence into the public spotlight, with decidedly mixed reactions. While there's been plenty of positive hype, many people view the launch of ChatGPT--and AI overall --with a good amount of hand-wringing.