One day in December 2009, Sumit Gulwani met a businesswoman on a flight from a seminar to his home. After the woman knew Gulwani was both a Ph.D. in computer science and a Microsoft researcher, she asked one question, “is there a way to merge two columns in Excel, when one column has a first name, the other the last, so that a column has both first and last names?” Gulwani couldn’t offer an answer.

On the stage stood a young man, wearing a simple shirt. As he talked slowly and clearly, you could feel the intensity and profound clarity. All the AI jargons became simple, weaved together in one beautiful framework. People who know him would not be surprised as he is the one behind some of those jargons. But it is a surprise for many people that he is also leading a billon-dollar nonprofit organization, whose mission is preparing humanity for the unavoidable proliferation of AI. Ilya Sutskever, who founded and still leads OpenAI, wants to open up AI technology to everyone and ensure that it is safe for the humanity.

Li Deng’s journey with AI has spanned for more than 3 decades. After working as corporate researcher and university professor and built his career in speech research, Deng has taken a plunge into the financial world: He joined the $30 billion hedge fund Citadel as the Chief AI Officer in May 2017, leaving behind his job as a Chief Scientist of AI at Microsoft, where he headed the company’s AI school and founded the Deep Learning Technology Center. Also left behind was his affiliated professorship at the University of Washington for over 17 years.

Facebook has quietly grown to be a video platform. It has the largest user-generated video content outside YouTube. Each day, people view Facebook videos for 8 billion times and spend 100 million hours watching (with 20 percent of videos live streamed). Facebook users can upload videos, stream live videos on their pages, and have video chats with their friends. Recently, Facebook launched a new feature that lets people do video chat in Facebook Groups.