By Aditya Malik, Founder, ValueMatrix.ai What oil was in the 18th century, data is in the 21st century – immensely valuable and influential. With the run towards AI supremacy, businesses and organizations possessing qualified and unbiased data win. However, the data openly available is marred with conscious and subconscious bias, largely due to woke or un-woke nature of humans. We don't know what we don't know – right or wrong is only temporary, as in always waiting to be judged with time.

"When it comes to the economy, data is the new oil," said entrepreneur Clive Humby in 2006. History has proven him right beyond all expectations. Empires have been built on bigger and bigger mountains of data. Over the course of a decade, GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) increased their sales from $78 billion in 2008 to $773 billion in 2019. From the outset, GAFA put everything into this new oil, developing data-driven services such as a search engine (Google), online sales (Amazon) and social networking (Facebook).

No, data is not the new oil. Data is nothing like oil. If someone likes to use the data-is-the-new-oil analogy in conversations about the value of data, chances are that they don't understand why data is valuable, or how to extract value from data. If you like to use this analogy yourself, this article is written for your consideration. Many business leaders today believe that their organization is sitting on a gold mine of data, and they just need to find a way to monetize it.

The new open-source IBM Cloud-Native Toolkit is the focus of this week's automation tales. This solution is for individuals who want to integrate and execute AI and machine learning technologies in cloud environments. Codex, a deep learning model that generates software source code, has been revealed by OpenAI. One of the most compelling reasons to adopt a public workspace is to improve developer onboarding by shortening the time to first call (TTFC), the most essential measure for a public API. While Elon Musk's brain-chip company messes around with gaming monkeys, another group of researchers has achieved a major milestone in neuroprosthetics: allowing a man who can't talk to form sentences with his mind.

We've been hearing how "data is the new oil" for more than a decade now, and in certain sectors, it's a maxim that has more than panned out. From marketing and logistics to finance and product, decision-making is now dominated by data at all levels of most big private orgs (and if it isn't, I'd be getting a resume put together, stat). So it might be a something of a surprise to learn that data, which could transform how we respond to the increasingly deadly disasters that regularly plague us, has been all but absent from much of emergency response this past decade. Far from being a geyser of digital oil, disaster response agencies and private organizations alike have for years tried to swell the scope and scale of the data being inputted into disaster response, with relatively meager results. That's starting to change though, mostly thanks to the internet of things (IoT), and frontline crisis managers today increasingly have the data they need to make better decisions across the resilience, response and recovery cycle.

We've been hearing how "data is the new oil" for more than a decade now, and in certain sectors, it's a maxim that has more than panned out. From marketing and logistics to finance and product, decision-making is now dominated by data at all levels of most big private orgs (and if it isn't, I'd be getting a résumé put together, stat). So it might be a something of a surprise to learn that data, which could transform how we respond to the increasingly deadly disasters that regularly plague us, has been all but absent from much of emergency response this past decade. Far from being a geyser of digital oil, disaster response agencies and private organizations alike have for years tried to swell the scope and scale of the data being inputted into disaster response, with relatively meager results. That's starting to change though, mostly thanks to the internet of things (IoT), and frontline crisis managers today increasingly have the data they need to make better decisions across the resilience, response, and recovery cycle.

Artificial intelligence is the new oil, and the governments or the countries that get the best datasets will unquestionably develop the best AI, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's chief technology officer said Oct. 15. Speaking on a panel about AI superpowers at the Politico AI Summit, Nand Mulchandani said AI is a very large technology and industry. "It's not a single, monolithic technology," he said. "It's a collection of algorithms, technologies, etc., all cobbled together to call AI." The United States has access to global datasets, and that's why global partnerships are so incredibly important, he said, noting the Defense Department launched the AI partnership for defense at the JAIC recently to have access to global datasets with partners, which gives DOD a natural advantage in building these systems at scale.

Artificial intelligence is the new oil, and the governments or the countries that get the best datasets will unquestionably develop the best AI, the Joint …

Conferences and vendor marketing materials are full of trite and banal sayings. Say something that seems to be profound, and perhaps they'll think that everything else you have to say is just as profound. One of the common refrains you might hear at many an AI and data-focused event is the pithy statement that "data is the new oil" as if that's supposed to mean something profound. The first time I heard this expression (about a decade ago, I should add), it was an interesting point to make about how "important" and "strategic" data is. But every time I've heard it since, it's bandied about to imply something more than it is.

Calling data as the new oil, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Budget speech announced the launch of a new policy to set up data centre parks for enabling digitisation of all public institutions in the country. While announcing the allocation of Rs 6,000 crore to the BharatNet programme, Sitharaman also said that advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, cloud computing, drones are disrupting the existent business models and rewriting the world economic order. "Data now is clearly the new oil. I propose a policy to set up data centre farms throughout the country. The idea is to skilfully incorporate data in every step of the value chain," she said.