Faisal Islam: What I learned from a week with the world's top finance leaders When it comes to the future direction of the global economy there is a bit of a tug of war going on. There are starkly opposing forces. On the one hand holding back growth are the familiar, recurring crises from the energy shock, trade conflict and actual war. This is reflected most clearly in the sharply rising interest rate costs for the world's advanced economies. Pulling in the other direction is the boost from massive spending on AI, and the frankly astonishing resilience shown especially by smaller economies, as new routes for trade, including for oil and gas, have been established out of necessity.

Katie Zacharia Was Linked to an AI Rare-Earths Startup. It's Even Weirder Than It Sounds The short-lived White House press secretary was listed as an adviser to a Kristi Noem-linked company that aims to use AI for mining. Both the company and she say she never worked there. Before being fired five days into her stint as White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia spent much of the day attempting to explain her past. Throughout her brief tenure, Zacharia's resume was the source of much intrigue.

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Artificial intelligence is helping computers drive cars, recognize faces in a crowd, and hold life-like conversations. General Electric engineers now say they've used the data-intensive technology to develop tools that could cut the industrial giant's design process for jet engines and power turbines in at least half, speeding up its next generation of products. Today, it might take two days for engineers to run a computational analysis of the fluid dynamics of a single design for a turbine blade or an engine component. Scientists at General Electric's research center in Niskayuna, New York, say they've leveraged machine learning to train a surrogate model so that it can evaluate a million different variations of a design in just 15 minutes. "This is, we think, a huge breakthrough," says Robert Zacharias, technology director of thermosciences at GE Research.

Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone. America hasn't possessed the world's most powerful supercomputer since June 2013, when a Chinese machine first claimed the title. Summit is expected to end that run when the official ranking of supercomputers, from an organization called Top500, is updated later this month.

Travel planning is incredibly stressful. Between researching options, paying for bookings, and organizing your itinerary, you may also have to contend with the risk of being beaten and dragged off planes. Machine intelligence can alleviate some of the pain points for both you and the travel companies you book with. Perhaps no one knows this better than Giorgos Zacharia, CTO of Kayak and holder of a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and machine learning from MIT. "AI is kind of a fashionable domain at present," he says, amused by the recent hype, "but we've been doing machine learning and AI at Kayak for a long time." Almost every aspect of your digital user experience is improved with AI.

Travel planning is incredibly stressful. Between researching options, paying for bookings, and organizing your itinerary, you may also have to contend with the risk of being beaten and dragged off planes. Machine intelligence can alleviate some of the pain points for both you and the travel companies you book with. Perhaps no one knows this better than Giorgos Zacharia, CTO of Kayak and holder of a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and machine learning from MIT. "AI is kind of a fashionable domain at present," he says, amused by the recent hype, "but we've been doing machine learning and AI at Kayak for a long time." Almost every aspect of your digital user experience is improved with AI. Your preferences towards specific seasons, hotel styles, and price parameters are carefully monitored so that you can be served results you're likely to book.

Travel planning is incredibly stressful. Between researching options, paying for bookings, and organizing your itinerary, you may also have to contend with the risk of being beaten and dragged off planes. Luckily, machine intelligence can alleviate some of the pain points for both you and the travel companies you book with. Perhaps no one knows this better than Giorgos Zacharia, CTO of Kayak and holder of a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and machine learning from MIT. "AI is kind of a fashionable domain at present," he says, amused by the recent hype, "but we've been doing machine learning and AI at Kayak for a long time." Almost every aspect of your digital user experience is improved with AI.

As Kayak attempts to build a better virtual travel agent, the tech firm is expanding beyond its core website and mobile app, and establishing a presence on additional types of technology platforms. Since mid-2015, Stamford, CT-based Kayak has made its travel-search service available to consumers on Apple Watch, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Apple TV, Amazon Alexa devices, and Google Home. The integrations with these outside platforms illustrate how businesses are adapting to changing consumer habits and trying to figure out the right ways to interact with users across an array of apps and devices. The moves also speak to the growing emphasis by consumer-focused businesses on deploying products and services powered by artificial intelligence-related technologies, such as chatbots on Facebook Messenger and Slack, and voice-controlled virtual personal assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, and Apple's Siri. "We have to be where the consumer is," says Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak's chief technology officer. "The consumer should be able to use Kayak in whatever their platform of choice is."