The recent blizzard of warnings about artificial intelligence and how it is transforming learning, upending legal, financial and organizational functions, and reshaping social and cultural interaction, have mostly left out the role it is already playing in governance. Governments in the US at every level are attempting the transition from a programmatic model of service delivery to a citizen-focused model. Los Angeles, the US's second largest city, is a pioneer in the field, unveiling technologies to help streamline bureaucratic functions from police recruitment to paying parking tickets to filling potholes or locating resources at the library. For now, AI advances are limited to automation. When ChatGPT was asked recently about how it might change how people deal with government, it responded that "the next generation of AI, which includes ChatGPT, has the potential to revolutionize the way governments interact with their citizens."

Historically, creativity has been considered an exclusively human trait. Our ability to create beautiful things, and more importantly imagine them, is what makes us human. Well, I hate breaking it to you, but AI has that trait as well. It can be amazingly creative. There are multiple examples and stories about that, and some of them are actually hard to believe. One of my favorite examples is this woman who asked ChatGPT to write a letter to her kid explaining that Santa wasn't real.

You'd have to have been living under the proverbial rock over the last 60 days, not to have heard about ChatGPT, a variant of the GPT (generative pre-training transformer) language model designed to generate human-like text in a conversational context. The technology has received massive attention, with predictions that it will do everything from "reshape humanity" to the old chestnuts of taking over human jobs and/or hijacking democracy. But does ChatGPT deserve all this praise? First, ChatGPT is only as good as what it's been trained on, so it may not be able to generate responses to prompts or situations that are not reflected in its training data. ChatGPT's algorithms haven't been trained on any data after 2021, so if you ask it to write something about current news events, it comes up empty.

At the tail end of last year, a curious new entry into the ebike market emerged: Urtopia. The company's mission seemed pretty clear, to make the most feature-rich, connected bike the world has ever seen. And with a built-in 4G SIM, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a fingerprint reader and mmWave sensors for collision detection, it was likely accomplished. Except, the model we tested was a prototype leaving us unable to evaluate some of the more interesting features. The retail version of the bike is almost identical to the pre-production version we tested at the end of last year bar a few minor cosmetic details.

When a question is presented to an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, it must be converted into a format that the algorithm can understand. This is often called "embedding a problem," to use the verb form of the word. Scientists also use the word as a noun and talk about an "embedding." In most cases, the embeddings are collections of numbers. They are often arranged in a vector to simplify their representation.

Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? If data is the new oil of the digital economy, artificial intelligence (AI) is the steam engine. Companies that take advantage of the power of data and AI hold the key to innovation -- just as oil and steam engines fueled transportation and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution. In 2022, data and AI have set the stage for the next chapter of the digital revolution, increasingly powering companies across the globe. How can companies ensure that responsibility and ethics are at the core of these revolutionary technologies?

Organisations are increasingly investing in AI because they see its potential. In the 2021 federal budget, the Australian government committed to investing more than $120 million in AI over the next four to six years through programs including the development of the National Artificial Intelligence Centre ($53.8 million over four years) and the establishment of the Next Generation AI Graduates Program ($24.7 million over six years). The government has also committed to providing $33.7 million over four years to support projects to develop AI based solutions to national challenges, and $12 million over five years to catalyse AI opportunities by co-funding up to 36 competitive grants to develop AI solutions that address local or regional problems. However, despite the increased investment in and use of AI across industries and businesses, there are lingering concerns over the technology's capacity to deliver on expectations. According to our recent 2021 Digital Readiness Survey, more than 86 per cent of Australian and New Zealand-based organisations reported an increase in the use of AI from two years ago, but only 25 per cent said their confidence in AI had significantly increased.

Google's foundational model BERT powers the search engine used by billions across the world. OpenAI's GPT-3 is a powerful language model that has forayed into downstream tasks such as building low code platforms. In the era of such large scale foundational models that directly impact many real-world applications, what are the risks that tag along? To answer this, the entire AI department at Stanford University has released a survey. In this report, the researchers have provided a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, their capabilities, applications, and societal impact.

Not only is technological innovation unfolding at breakneck pace, but the reach of its influence is exponentially expanding as well. Digitalisation is disrupting a broad swath of industries, and finance is no exception. With new financial technology start-ups reimagining banking and accounting, CFOs from companies across every industry have been empowered to change how they work, and often for the better. But in financial services, as in any industry touched by the spark of technology, questions remain – how much will technology influence the future of finance? To what extent will automation dominate the financial field?

If your business is like most, it probably has some automation or AI in its sales process. It might provide information to customers or reinforce your value proposition. Maybe it helps close a sale. Given the market conditions that are driving greater investment in AI and automation, you may be looking to upgrade the sophistication of these sales tools by introducing intelligence to optimize sales and cut costs. Wherever you are on your journey, it's important that you remind yourself that AI and automation are like actors.