Companies in Africa and the Middle East are building AI capacity in very different ways, a new study found. AI is growing fast in both regions despite shortages of talent and data.

The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.

Governments have struggled to find a tax formula that promotes prosperity without creating extremes of wealth and poverty. Can machine learning show the way?

Asian companies lead the world in AI deployment, new research argues. Market research by MIT Technology Review Insights found that companies in the Asia-Pacific region are using machine learning faster and with better results than any other part of the world.

Artificial intelligence has moved from the age of discovery to the age of implementation. Among our invested portfolios, primarily in China, we see flourishing applications using AI and automation in banking, finance, transportation, logistics, supermarkets, restaurants, warehouses, factories...

As black-box algorithms like neural networks find their way into high-stakes fields such as transportation, healthcare, and finance, researchers have developed techniques to help explain models’ decisions. New findings show that some of these methods can be fooled.

The world’s largest stock market is using AI to flag suspicious trading in real time. Nasdaq is testing a deep learning system to monitor trading of ts U.S. equities. Named Chiron, the system watches for behaviors that indicate potential market manipulation.

The UK’s banking industry is using AI in many facets of the business. A survey of financial firms in the UK found that nearly two-thirds of respondents have deployed machine learning technology. Many said they expect their use to double in the next two years.

Could humanity be destroyed by its own creation? If binary code running on a computer awakens into sentience, it will be able to think better than humans. It may even be able to improve its own software and hardware.

Will biases in training data unwittingly turn AI into a tool for persecution? Bias encoded in software used by nominally objective institutions like, say, the justice or education systems will become impossible to root out.

Could the flood of hype for artificial intelligence lead to a catastrophic collapse in funding? AI will fail to deliver on promises inflated by businesses and researchers. Investors will migrate to greener pastures, and AI Winter will descend.

Theoretical advances can be thrilling, but the excitement can drown out all the ways AI is actually being put to use. DeepIndex provides an up-to-date, well organized, cheeky guide to practical applications culled from news reports.