In a sign of the times, the Hillsborough mansion recently changed its name from Neogenesis to AGI House. AGI is short for "artificial general intelligence," a phrase popularized by OpenAI to describe the idea of AI that is smarter than a human. OpenAI argues that tools like ChatGPT, which can instantly answer questions or generate text like software code and college essays, or the text-to-image generator DALL-E, can respond to a user's natural language prompt, as steppingstones toward superhuman AI. The term "AGI" has become a watchword for proponents who share the belief that this technological wave of AI will transform the internet.

The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorite for investors. U.K. cities made up a fifth of the top 20 European cities, with names such as Oxford, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge rising to the fore in 2020. Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year -- local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment.

In 1998, China was hardly a technological rival to the US. With only 7 million internet users, fewer than 26 million personal computers, and an ecommerce industry that generated a paltry $42 million the following year, it was considered a laggard compared with many other countries. But Microsoft, then the world's richest and most powerful tech company, recognized the potential. That year, then-CEO Bill Gates created Microsoft Research China, an engineering outpost in Beijing to tap into a pool of talent and establish ties to the country's tech scene. In the following years, Microsoft launched internet operations in China when other US tech companies were stymied.

Society Do I Know You? Technology ICT Pauliina Alanen has ventured a long way from her social science studies to become a tech professional, making a pit stop in Silicon Valley on the road to her current post at Finnish artificial intelligence company Silo.AI. To balance her studies in social and political science, Alanen dipped into the tech scene during her student years and ended up working for Jolla – the Nokia offshoot – as an assistant. Back then, she felt like blushing when telling people she worked in the tech scene, as it was so new and exciting to her. However, at Jolla she found a fertile environment and culture to learn the ropes of the scene, which helped her to realise every tech-head's dream: move to California and work at a startup in Silicon Valley. After nearly two years, she returned to Finland to tap into one of the leading trends in the field – artificial intelligence – whilst working for one of its leading proponents in the Nordics: Silo.AI.

Some of the biggest names in tech are lining up to join Montreal's burgeoning artificial intelligence cluster, but harnessing the sector's full potential depends on creating homegrown tech champions, not just celebrating investments by large multinationals, warns one of Canada's godfathers of deep learning. Canada is at the centre of research charting new ways to mine big data with implications for everything from better medical diagnoses to self-driving cars and Montreal is emerging as a hub thanks to a large concentration of available researchers in a low-cost city with great social values. Facebook became the latest Silicon Valley giant to set up shop in the city with a Sept. 15 announcement that it would open a research lab and invest $7 million in Montreal's AI community, joining Google, Microsoft and Samsung, which all have a presence in the city. More deals are likely on the way, according to Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the pioneers of deep learning -- an AI subset that uses neural networks to mimic the way a human brain learns and adapts. Bengio, who heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, one of Canada's three main AI centres of excellence, recently partnered with Samsung to open a University of Montreal lab that will focus on developing algorithms for use in voice and visual recognition, robotics, autonomous driving and translations.

THE world reeled when Lee Sedol – one of the great modern players of the ancient board game Go – was beaten by Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) program, AlphaGo. The AI managed to outmaneuver Lee at his own game, one which rewards players' strategic judgment and creative analyses. To achieve this, DeepMind provided AlphaGo with the basic framework of the game, recordings of previous games and made it play itself continuously. The software mimics the processes of human learning – and as it went along, AlphaGo learned to be a better player over time. The day of the face-off, AlphaGo beat Lee four games to one and was awarded the highest Go game-master ranking.

The former Google CEO, who now serves as the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, appeared at the Startup Fest Europe conference in the Netherlands on May 24, discussing everything from artificial intelligence to Google's new chat app Allo -- as well as its regulatory environment. Google is currently the subject of antitrust investigations by the European Commission over alleged anti-competitive practices relating to Search and Android, and could face billions in fines. Asked by CNBC interviewer Julia Chatterley about the problems facing Google-linked venture capital firm GV, Schmidt said there are "lots of issues in the European Union that have to get addressed" -- and went on to list what he perceives to be the key problems holding back the continent's tech scene, from education to legislation. "Let's start with the universities in Europe. We hire incredibly smart people that come out of the European universities. Universities themselves are underfunded relative to the American universities, by a lot."