An Aussie entrepreneur is copping flack online for his contentious and, frankly, dystopian startup designed to identify people and source information about them, from a single image. According to The New York Times, the technology has already been provided to more than 600 law enforcement agencies, including local police in Florida, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Founded by Hoan Ton-That, Clearview AI is a secretive Silicon Valley startup that has been reportedly operating in stealth mode for some time. It's facial recognition app allows users to take a picture of a person and upload it, to access public photos of that person, and the sites on which they appear (think Facebook and YouTube). It has a database of about 3 billion images.

Should we believe headlines claiming nearly half of all jobs will be lost to robots and artificial intelligence? We think not, and in a newly released study, we explain why. Headlines trumpeting massive job losses have been in abundance for five or so years. Most come from a common source. It is a single study, conducted in 2013 by Oxford University's Carl Benedict Frey and Michael Osborne.

The tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook have all begun to use machine learning to give you tips on what to wear. Is fashion styling the next field to be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI), or will the human eye remain supreme? It's too soon to know for sure, but understanding what machine learning is good at and how that overlaps with what fashion is all about can help us make some educated guesses. One thing machine learning does very well is finding patterns and common features among groups of items. Taking advantage of this, Google Lens and Amazon Style Snap can each identify a garment from a photo or video and then tell you a bit more, like how other people have worn it or where you can buy it.

Brisbane startup FloodMapp has raised $1.3 million, as it looks to take its flood-prediction tech to the rest of Australia, and into hurricane-prone areas of the US. The funding comes from several VC firms, including Allectus Capital, Transition Level Investments, Jelix Ventures and Mercurian, as well as from a number of individual investors. Founded by Juliette Murphy and Ryan Prosser, FloodMapp combines big data analytics and machine learning techniques with traditional hydrology and hydraulic modelling approaches. The tech measures river height and rainfall data in real-time, and uses underlying elevation and topography to predict how and where water will flow over the land, Murphy tells StartupSmart. This allows the team to "predict a map of the inundated areas" and share that data with third parties.

A Brisbane startup pitching itself as "Photoshop for voice" has taken the wraps off its first product, a creative studio powered by an AI able to perfectly replicate someone's voice. Fittingly named Replica, the startup is headed up by founding trio Shreyas Nivas, Riccardo Grinover and Keni Mardira, and has been running in a stealth mode of sorts for the past two years, while the three were building the product. With each founder having varying areas of expertise, Nivas -- who holds a degree in aerospace engineering -- tells StartupSmart the team was brought together through a love for games, and inspired by research into voice synthesis coming out of Google. "Around late 2016, Google released a paper on WaveNet, which was a neural network for voice synthesis which could create human-like speech. It was a natural transition from text-to-speech, and it was almost indistinguishable from actual conversation," he says.

The idea of robots taking our jobs is not radically new. But artificial intelligence (AI) is now completely reorganising the global economy. Some estimates of productivity-driven economic growth conclude that AI will contribute approximately $US16 trillion ($23 trillion) to the global economy by 2030. Unfortunately -- compared to the European Union, Japan, United States and United Kingdom -- Australia has been relatively late in turning to address the challenges of AI, and creating the right policies to deal with its many implications (good and bad). For our economy to thrive, what we need now is the right mix of governance, regulation, civil society participation, industry support and business compliance -- as well as the development and deepening of digital literacy throughout Australian communities.

The idea of robots taking our jobs is not radically new. But artificial intelligence (AI) is now completely reorganising the global economy. Some estimates of productivity-driven economic growth conclude that AI will contribute approximately $US16 trillion ($23 trillion) to the global economy by 2030. Unfortunately -- compared to the European Union, Japan, United States and United Kingdom -- Australia has been relatively late in turning to address the challenges of AI, and creating the right policies to deal with its many implications (good and bad). For our economy to thrive, what we need now is the right mix of governance, regulation, civil society participation, industry support and business compliance -- as well as the development and deepening of digital literacy throughout Australian communities.

Whether you do your shopping online or in store, your retail experience is the latest battleground for the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning revolution. Major Australian retailers have begun to realise they have a lot to gain from getting their AI strategy right, with Woolworths currently openly recruiting a head of AI and machine learning to be supported by a team of data scientists. The newly developed Woolworths division WooliesX aims to bring together a diverse group of teams -- including technology, customer digital experience, e-commerce, financial services and digital customer experience. To understand the opportunities and threats for all major retailers, it's useful to understand why artificial intelligence is back on the agenda. Two crucial things have changed since the initial forays into AI decades ago: data and computing power.

The beauty of artificial intelligence (AI) is its capacity to release marketers from the heavy burden of manual execution. Freeing them up to ideate, create and tell brand stories that truly engage their customers. This week I speak to Or Shani, founder and CEO of AlbertTM – the world's first and only AI marketing platform – about how AI is not here to replace our intelligence, but to augment it. When I stepped back into the fold of RedBalloon in mid 2017, I discovered we had largely outsourced our key capacity – marketing. We were buying customers one-by-one, over and over again, pulling the same marketing levers repeatedly, with mixed success; all with little to no transparency over where our advertising dollars were going.

Not only does millionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk have his fingers in a lot of different startup pies, he also has a lot of something else: opinions. It's well documented that Musk loves to share these opinions, however weird, through Twitter, sometimes going so far as to get into fights with various members of the public over city planning and the merits of public transport (he's not a fan). But every now and then Musk will express some of his better thought-out opinions through a different platform, such as via an interview or at a conference. This time, he was interviewed for a short documentary called Do You Trust This Computer? Given its name, you may have guessed the topic was the future of artificial intelligence.