Will Your Favorite Apps Be Along for the Ride? Tech companies are calling AI the next platform. But some developers are reluctant to let AI agents stand between them and their users. Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI are racing to develop "operating systems" for AI-powered devices--and 2026 is likely the year these efforts will start to take off. The devices are largely built around a future where AI agents can take actions on a user's behalf, without requiring them to visit an app or website.

Surprise, Discord is partnering with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT throughout the app. There's a chatbot, obviously, but the company also plans to use machine learning in a handful of more novel and potentially useful ways. Starting next week, the company will begin rolling out a public experiment that will augment Clyde, the built-in bot Discord employs to notify users of errors and respond to their slash commands, with conversational capabilities. Judging from the demo it showed off, Discord envisions people turning to Clyde for information they would have obtained from Google in the past. For instance, you might ask the chatbot for the local time in the place where someone on your server lives to decide if it would be appropriate to message them.

There has been a lot of excited talk recently about the threat to jobs posed by automation, robots, and now Artificial Intelligence (AI): machines that can think like humans. We're told that ever more complex tasks can now be automated and perhaps done better as a result, and we should all be preparing for a world in which we're competing for work with computers. Is teaching one of the jobs put at risk by the emergence of AI? Or does AI have potential to enhance life in the classroom? A recent event organised by BESA, the industry body for education suppliers, provided plenty of food for thought about these questions. He argued that AI can help us move away from the "factory model of education" towards a more open-ended system focused on creativity and problem solving – and he said we're seeing early signs of what technology can bring us in innovations such as "no lecture hall" universities and courses offering "nanodegrees".

Teaching machines to parse through large volumes of data to learn new concepts and rules is a critical area of development in artificial intelligence, experts told CNBC. That concept is called machine learning, and it's been a longtime goal for the AI discipline: The term was coined in 1959 by AI pioneer Arthur Samuel who defined it as a computer's ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. To do that, mathematical models are built and then fed with huge volumes of data, experts said. The algorithms learn to identify patterns and assumptions from those data sets that are then applied to process new information. "We want to be able to use the machine's own capability to learn from complex data," Eric Chang, senior director at Microsoft Research Asia, told CNBC.

At age 25, Anjney Midha has a stronger resume than some people twice his age. Before graduating from Stanford, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He led the firm's investment in Magic Leap, the mysterious and much-hyped augmented reality company. Then he ditched venture capital to pursue a dream that had followed him from a technology-free young adulthood on a bird sanctuary in India, to the hyper-connected streets of Singapore, to his days at Stanford. That dream was to share his world--more than he could show in a photo, better than what he could convey with words--with the family and friends he'd left in India.