  This Year’s Hottest Job Involves Artificial Intelligence December 10, 2019
Bye bye blockchain developer, hello artificial intelligence specialist. That role, A.I. specialist, is the fastest growing U.S. job in terms of number of hires, at least according to LinkedIn, which published its annual emerging jobs report on Tuesday. Hirings for A.I. specialists on the career networking service have grown 74% annually over the past four years, LinkedIn said. But it didn’t reveal how many jobs that represents, only that demand for that job role is growing faster than other emerging jobs. What's noteworthy about this year's survey is that last year's top job role, blockchain developer, is absent from the latest list. It highlights how the recent craze over cryptocurrencies and blockchain created a brief demand for blockchain-related jobs, but as the hype died down, so too did demand for people with blockchain skills. "It was spectacular, but vanished very quickly," LinkedIn's principal economist Guy Berger said. The fact that blockchain developers did not make this year's emerging job list caused Berger to say that it validates his company’s data by showing it accurately reflects "a failed trend or a flash in the pan." No. 2 on the list was “robotics engineer,” an umbrella term for both physical robotics and so-called robotic process automation, a trendier technology that involves software automating basic tasks like entering data into a table. The third fastest growing job in terms of hiring was “data scientist.” A.I. specialist is an evolution of other machine-learning and data-crunching job titles that have topped the list before. Although A.I. specialists may share some traits with data scientists, the work of data scientists involves a wider set of statistical or data visualizations tools versus just machine learning software, Berger said. The top metropolitan areas where A.I. specialists are in demand include the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Computer software, Internet, information technology, higher education, and consumer electronics are the industries with the biggest appetite. The most common jobs that A.I. specialists held prior to labeling themselves with the title include "software engineer," "data scientist," "research assistant," and "data engineer," a LinkedIn spokesperson said. This suggests that people may be updating their job titles to include artificial intelligence, to put themselves in a better position to capitalize on the current A.I. boom. "When you talk about A.I., again it's super high in demand," Berger said. "I think there's more and more interest in taking data science to the next level." Jonathan Vanian A note: Last week, we started using a new newsletters platform. Our newsletters are experiencing some formatting bugs. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve them. A.I. IN THE NEWS
Seeing big bucks. SenseTime, a Chinese startup specializing in facial recognition technology, could make $750 million in sales during fiscal 2019, a 200% year-over-year increase, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources. Although SenseTime's sales are growing slower than they were in previous years, the company is still making a lot of money despite being blacklisted by the U.S. government, the report added. Hungry for A.I. chips. Intel could spend $1 billion to $2 billion to acquire Israeli A.I. computer chip company Habana Labs, according to Israel business news publication Calcalist, as recounted by The Times of Israel. "If the deal goes through, it would make it Intel's second-largest acquisition in Israel," the report said. Keeping up with Amazon. Amazon's plans to become a supermarket titan has caused traditional grocers to invest in and experiment with cutting-edge technology like shelf-scanning robots and automated warehouse systems, Bloomberg News reported. "In their backrooms, some food retailers are building automated warehouses that prepare online grocery orders, eliminating the need for the expensive armies of human shoppers who currently troll the aisles harvesting products for Instacart and other services," the report said. The VA goes bets on A.I. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs debuted the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII), an A.I. research group intended to help the federal agency embark on cutting-edge data-crunching projects that help veterans. "The NAII designs and collaborates on large-scale AI R&D initiatives, national AI policy, and partnerships across agencies, industries, and academia," according to the NAII's website.
RECOGNIZING A.I. SNAKE OIL
Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University associate computer science professor, wrote a guide about how to cut through A.I.'s hype. For instance, people shouldn't assume that business applications will be immediately supercharged by A.I. just because researchers have developed A.I. systems that master board games like Go. He writes: "For example, AlphaGo is a remarkable intellectual accomplishment that deserves to be celebrated. Ten years ago, most experts would not have thought it possible. But it has nothing in common with a tool that claims to predict job performance." EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Hanabi as an A.I. test bed. Facebook researchers presented a paper, to be published in 2020 by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence , detailing an A.I. system that learned to master the Solitaire-like card game Hanabi. Using a combination of reinforcement learning and a variant of the "Monte Carlo" search technique, the researchers were able to create digital bots that could work in tandem to beat the game at a high score. When it comes to developing your A.I. strategy, it boils down to three main options: build A.I. solutions from scratch, buy from an existing vendor, or partner with a trusted company that has the expertise. Which will you choose? FORTUNE ON A.I.
IBM Trials A.I. That Can Do Soccer Commentary—By Jeremy Kahn China's 'Big Gamble': Lessons From the Bike Sharing Bust May Hang Over Its A.I. Boom—By Grady McGregor Why I Opt Out of Facial Recognition—By Robert Hackett Amazon Touts Machine Learning, 'Local Zones,' and A.I. Tool as Cloud Competition Heats Up—By Jonathan Vanian
BRAIN FOOD
Keeping tabs of LEGOS with A.I. Children (and adults) love assembling Lego blocks to create castles and spaceships. But sorting through all those multi-colored blocks can be a chore when it's time to put the toys away. Enter an A.I.-powered LEGO sorting machine built by Australian software developer Daniel West, as LEGO fan website The Brother's Brick noted . Using neural networks trained to recognize different LEGOs, the contraption scans LEGO blocks and separates them into their appropriate buckets. As West says in his YouTube video, the machine "can take the human element out of sorting completely by recognizing almost 3,000 different types of Lego parts."
Thanks for reading.
If you liked this email, pay it forward. Share it with someone you know.
Did someone share this with you? Sign up here. For previous editions, click here.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
This Year's Hottest Job Involves Artificial Intelligence
Friday, December 6, 2019
CEO Daily: Metrics for Corporate Behavior
 December 6, 2019
Good morning. It is Friday, so some feedback. KF wrote in to call my attention to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that suggested signatories of the Business Roundtable corporate purpose statement were more engaged in "virtue signaling" than actual virtue. I had missed it, but you can read the piece here. It was written by two academics, who matched each company that signed the BRT statement with a control company, and then used several metrics to measure their "stakeholder" performance. Some of the metrics strike me as questionable. For instance, they used both shareholder buybacks and market concentration as signals of anti-social corporate behavior. Bottom line: the BRT firms didn't score as well as the control group. That is the opposite of the findings of two other groups whose work I respect—Just Capital and the Drucker Institute. Both found Business Roundtable companies did better than other companies on the metrics that matter most to stakeholders. But the debate underscores a fundamental problem as companies move away from a pure shareholder return model. Metrics matter. It will be hard to hold companies accountable for their obligations to society until we can agree on how to measure those obligations. More news below. Alan Murray TOP NEWS
Aramco Valuation Saudi Aramco has priced its shares at the top of the targeted range: $8.53. That should make its upcoming IPO the biggest ever, but not by much—Alibaba raised $25 billion in 2014, and Aramco intends to raise $25.6 billion. That represents a 1.5% stake in the oil giant, at a total valuation of $1.7 trillion. Wall Street Journal Uber Assaults Uber has published its long-awaited safety study, revealing that there were 3,000 sexual assaults reported on its U.S. rides alone last year, including 235 rapes. There were also 107 car-related fatalities in 2017 and 2018, and 19 fatal physical assaults. Chief legal officer Tony West: "Confronting sexual violence requires honesty, and it's only by shining a light on these issues that we can begin to provide clarity on something that touches every corner of society." Fortune Pork and Beans China, which has been suffering a major pork shortage due to an outbreak of African swine fever, is to waive tariffs on some U.S. soybean and pork shipments. The move comes as China and the U.S. attempt to at least partially resolve their trade war. CNBC China Loan Speaking of Sino-American rivalry, the U.S. has objected to a $1-billion-a-year loan to China from the World Bank. The U.S. line is that China is no longer a developing economy, so does not deserve low-interest loans from the World Bank, whose greatest contributor is the U.S. Let's see how this turns out, bearing in mind that former Trump administration Treasury official David Malpass took over as World Bank president this year. Financial Times AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Evil Hackers The U.S. has indicted two members of a Russia-based hacking group called Evil Group, over a mega-hack that saw $100 million stolen from companies around the world. The men are Maksim Yakubets and Igor Turashev, who are charged with bank fraud, conspiracy, computer hacking and wire fraud. Only issue is that their whereabouts are not known—there's a $5 million reward on offer for information leading to their arrest and conviction, which is a record for cybercrime. Al Jazeera Amazon Cases Amazon faces a series of lawsuits over combustible hoverboards that were bought over the platform. The cases are challenging the idea that Amazon is not liable for the safety of the products traded in its marketplace—though so far, Amazon has argued its side successfully in court. WSJ German Manufacturing German's industrial output fell unexpectedly in October due to weak demand. Experts expected a 0.3% month-on-month rise, but instead got a 0.4% drop. Orders from other Eurozone countries were up, but those from within Germany and outside the Eurozone were down. Bloomberg Sydney Fires Australia's biggest city, Sydney, is covered in smoke due to a series of bushfires that have just combined into a mega-blaze to the city's north. This year's fires started in early November, which is months earlier than usual, and have so far claimed at least four lives. Satellite images have shown the smoke spreading as far as New Zealand. Reuters This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
Industry Adopts Blockchain Most industry leaders no longer ask "Will blockchain technology work?" They ask "How can we make blockchain technology work for us?" Read Deloitte's new report to see how leaders in individual industries are adopting blockchain to create long-term value.
Thanks for reading.
If you liked this email, pay it forward. Share it with someone you know.
Did someone share this with you? Sign up here. For previous editions, click here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
