The frenzied and intoxicating showcase for consumer technology known as CES took place this week in Las Vegas. Every January, the industry's big shindig descends on this city in the Nevada desert, drawing tech manufacturers, retailers, distributors, members of the press, gadget fans, and regular old lookie-loos into the fray. The Las Vegas Convention Center, hotel expos halls, nightclubs, restaurants, and event centers are stuffed with talking screens, self-driving cars, flying cars, self-adjusting audio speakers, and ChatGPT-enabled appliances for the smart home. Indeed, this is the year that AI ate everything in sight; old products were freshened up by an injection of machine intelligence, and new products were launched to help people interface with these new generative tools. Our photographer Alex Welsh captured some of this consumer tech revolution in full swing as he roamed the halls of CES 2024.

Humans were asking it all kinds of questions. Some were humorous (write song lyrics about AI taking jobs in the style of rapper Eminem); others more innocent (how should a mother tell her 6-year old son Santa isn't real, one person asked); while others seemed useful (complete this tricky computer code, people requested). Over a million users explored it within its first few days of launching on Nov. 30, touting how lifelike the answers were.

Artificial intelligence has been moving so fast that even the scientists are finding it hard to keep up. In the past year, machine learning algorithms have started to generate rudimentary movies and stunning fake photographs. In the future, we'll probably look back on 2022 as the year AI shifted from processing information to creating content as well as many humans. But what if we also look back on it as the year AI took a step towards the destruction of the human species? As hyperbolic and ridiculous as that sounds, public figures from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and going right back to Alan Turing, have expressed concerns about the fate of humans in a world where machines surpass them in intelligence, with Musk saying AI was becoming more dangerous than nuclear warheads.

Computer scientists have spent more than two decades teaching, training and developing machines to see the world around them. Only recently have the artificial eyes begun to match (and occasionally exceed) their biological predecessors. In September of this year, a team of researchers from Google's DeepMind division published a paper outlining the operation of their newest Generative Adversarial Network. Dubbed BigGAN, this image-generation engine leverages Google's massive cloud computing power to create extremely realistic images. But, even better, the system can be leveraged to generate dreamlike, almost nightmarish, visual mashups of objects, symbols and virtually anything else you train the system with.

Cloud computing is already a huge business, and competition is stiff. But this year, tech firms opened a new front in the battle to win users over in the cloud: the large-scale introduction of cloud-based AI. For small and medium-size companies, building AI-capable systems at scale can be prohibitively expensive, largely because training algorithms takes a lot of computing power. Enter the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, each of which has vast stores of computing power and a big stake in the $40 billion cloud computing industry. For them, adding AI is simply a matter of keeping up with customers, who increasingly are looking for cost-effective ways of building machine learning into their software.

RESEARCHERS have been working on artificial intelligence (AI) for decades, but my colleagues and I at Microsoft believe that 2018 will be the year AI comes to the fore and begins to drive real impact in a truly ubiquitous and meaningful way. Increased availability of data, growing cloud computing power, and more powerful algorithms are giving rise to computing systems that can see, hear, learn and reason, creating new opportunities to improve education and healthcare, address poverty and achieve a more sustainable future. In business, AI is also fast becoming one of the top technologies organisations are exploring to accelerate their own digital transformation as they seek to create new value for their customers in today's digital-first world. AI needs to be people first and technology second. Put simply, we need to develop AI to augment human capabilities, especially humankind's innate ingenuity.

Cloud computing is already a huge business, and competition is stiff. But this year, tech firms opened a new front in the battle to win users over in the cloud: the large-scale introduction of cloud-based AI. For small and medium-size companies, building AI-capable systems at scale can be prohibitively expensive, largely because training algorithms takes a lot of computing power. Enter the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, each of which has vast stores of computing power and a big stake in the $40 billion cloud computing industry. For them, adding AI is simply a matter of keeping up with customers, who increasingly are looking for cost-effective ways of building machine learning into their software.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was one of 2017's hottest industry buzzwords as many have begun turning to machines to solve problems that are simply too large for humans to calculate. Once upon a time, AI was an academic pursuit -- but now it has become more affordable and attainable to pursue on a smaller scale, opening it up to use by a variety of companies for a variety of purposes. Feedzai recently told PYMNTS that Big Data paved the way for this shift, and that by 2020, U.S. companies could be saving as much as $60 billion thanks to the help of AI and machine learning. Business management consultancy Accenture expects AI to add $8.3 trillion in economic activity for the U.S. by 2035. It's clear that this trend is building some significant momentum in the payments space and adjacent industries.

Many of these AI-development companies are quickly turning their sights on real-world challenges. Google DeepMind has already moved the AlphaGo Zero system away from the game and onto a comprehensive study of protein folding in the hopes of revealing a treatment for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Over the past 12 months, AI has beaten us at poker, Go, Pac-Man and Dota 2, marking 2017 as a milestone year in the evolution of artificial intelligence. It points towards a future where AI will essentially be able to do everything we can, but better.