Picture this: You receive an audio message from your sister. She says she's lost her wallet and asks if you can send some cash so she can pay a bill on time. A video appears from a celebrity you follow. In it, they ask for contributions toward their latest project. You receive a video of yourself, showing you in a physically intimate situation.

It was most evident in laptops: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips kicked off Microsoft's Copilot PC era with long life and surprisingly competitive performance, only to be rivaled by Intel's Macbook-killing Lunar Lake chips months later. AMD, meanwhile, focused on bringing high-octane speed to Copilot PCs, zigging for oomph while the others zagged to endurance. With competition flourishing, PCWorld expects to review over 120 laptops by the end of the year, by far a new high water mark! This year, cutting-edge monitors became the norm, Thunderbolt docks and SSDs embraced newer, faster standards, Intel and AMD launched overhauled desktop CPUs, gaming handhelds got truly competitive, and the software that runs on all that hardware kept getting better and better, too. With such a gluttony of choice, it became harder than ever for PC hardware and software to impress us. Few products earned our rare Editors' Choice award.

AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) platforms are getting more and more popular these days, as they allow us to automate the process of applying machine learning end-to-end. This offers the additional advantages of producing quicker and more straightforward solutions and models that quite often outperform hand-designed models. There are several such paid and open-source AutoML platforms in the market like H2O, Data Robot, Google AutoML, TPOT, Auto-Sklearn, etc. All of them come with their pros and cons, and I don't get into the debate of which one is the best of all. Instead, this article focuses on one of the latest features I observed in H2O AutoML -- "Model Explainability".

It seems that innovation and a constant strive to surpass the technological advances of yore is weaved into the very essence of our DNA. It seems, that humankind is on a never-ending mission to achieve greatness. One such endeavour is the decades-long development and implementation of artificial intelligence, its systematic weaving into the very fabric of our existence. From the benefits AI will bring to the medical industry, to its impact on the progress of space exploration, all the way down to shaping our personal living environment and our own little cosmos – it seems that AI is our inevitable future. And what a future it will be!

For almost a century, movies and literature have explored the possibility of technology beginning to think for itself--often with a dystopian spin. Consider that today, artificial intelligence is known far and wide as AI--which also happens to be the title of the 2001 Steven Spielberg drama (based on a 1969 short story) where indeed, machines inherit the world from their human creators. And just months ago, at least two billionaire visionaries, Tesla Founder Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, spoke out about the potential evils. Musk has called AI "our biggest existential threat" while Cuban, for his own part, used much stronger language to express his anxiety. Fears of the future are one thing; the present reality, however, represents quite another.