ChatGPT recently attracted vast attention in and outside the research community for its conversational abilities that mimic human ones exceptionally well. At the heart of systems like ChatGPT are Large Language Models (LLM). These models, rooted in deep neural networks, have the ability to predict the next textual token in a series of tokens based on statistical occurrences in extremely large data sets [1]. When the models are sufficiently big and well-tuned, one observes the "unreasonable effectiveness of data" [2] in how the system generates perfectly intelligible and believable sentences. Such ability to have human-like conversations with a software system is both stunning for the quality of the conversation and mind-blowing in terms of the potential impact on society and the job market in particular [3, 4].

In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our "Wonder" issue in February, 2021. Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth's appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them becoming extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of Earth's history--the last hundred centuries--the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture--and later urbanization.

According to Ray Kurzweil, "Singularity is a future period in which technology change will be so rapid and its impact so profound, that every aspect of human life will be irreversibly transformed; there won't be a clear distinction between the humans and the machines". He predicts that the computers will not remain as we see them today. They will become a part of human bodies and brains in the years to come until we become the hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence and its components. If we humans look back into our civilization, as it existed and progressed a few thousand years back, it, in no way, compares with the speed at which we are progressing now. A few thousand years before, we barely existed, let alone, progress.

Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth's appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them becoming extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of Earth's history--the last hundred centuries--the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture--and later urbanization. The changes accelerated as the human population increased. Then came even faster changes.

Building truly strong AI is an incredibly fascinating area. Companies like Numenta are working to understand the neocortex of the human mind to achieve great strides in AI. Matt Taylor from Numenta will be speaking at AI with the Best on their work with strong AI that follows principles learnt from neuroscience, here are some of his insights. Artificial neural networks is likely to be the sort of AI technology you've heard about before. Matt explains that "the current AI landscape is dominated by technologies rooted in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The neuronal model used by these systems was architected decades ago before we understood much about how neurons really worked."