• SpaceX launched a Dragon cargo ship toward the International Space Station on Friday.
• In addition to supplies, the spaceship will deliver an artificially intelligent robotic head to astronauts.
• The 11-pound robot is called Crew Interactive Mobile Companion (CIMON).
• CIMON can fly around and will use IBMWatson software to talk with an animated face and interact with astronauts.

Just before dawn on Friday, SpaceX launched a spaceship with nearly 6,000 lbs of cargo to the International Space Station.

The Dragon ship is slated to reach the ISS on Monday and is mostly filled with science experiments, food, water, and other supplies. But the mission contains a few extra goodies for astronauts, including a flying, talking, interactive robotic head.

The orb-shaped device is called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, and weighs about 11 pounds. It will use microphones and cameras to record astronauts, has an expressive digital face, and can even make small talk.

"CIMON will be the first [artificial intelligence]-based mission and flight assistance system," Manfred Jaumann, a payload engineer at Airbus (which helped build the robot), said in a press release. He added that CIMON will be a "a free flyer, a kind of flying brain" that will interact with, aid, and learn from astronauts.

Though CIMON is a far cry from the HAL 9000 supercomputer in the classic sci-fi book and movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," its capabilities are nonetheless impressive.

The machine's "brain" is powered by a version of IBM Watson — the software that famously defeated "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 to win $1 million.

The CIMON project aims explore how astronauts get along with artificially intelligent beings for extended periods of time, according to NASA's pre-flight briefing materials.

Training a floating head to be a friend

CIMON was created primarily by the German Aerospace Center, in collaboration with IBM, the European Space Agency, and other partners.

At first, the robot's only friend will be German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who launched to the space station on June 6. CIMON's team trained the robot to recognize Gerst's voice via microphones and his face using cameras. In orbit, the machine will follow Gerst around like a puppy, using an air-propulsion system.

The robot has a stand-alone version of Watson AI in its memory banks. That means CIMON can interpret data, respond to commands, solve problems, and generally be a useful little robot without any internet connection — a tricky problem in space.

Gerst will unbox CIMON sometime after Monday and use the flying robot through October. During that time, it will help Gerst solve basic problems and check off tasks like a digital assistant.

CIMON has three big missions to do, according to Airbus. One is to guide Gerst through a crystal-growth experiment. The second is for CIMON to look at a Rubik's cube through its camera and give Gerst instructions for how to solve it. The final task is to record and assist Gerst while he performs a complex medical experiment.

"Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps," Matthias Biniok, the lead Watson architect in Germany, wrote in an IBM blog post. He said "CIMON knows them all"— so astronauts shouldn't have to worry as much about missing a step.

In addition to helping with experiments, CIMON is equipped with sensors that can alert astronauts to dangerous conditions when they're not near a computer console.

"It can also serve as an early warning system for technical problems," Airbus said.

A model for artificially intelligent astronaut assistants?

CIMON will use a neural network to interact with and learn from Gerst, at least at first.

Ultimately, CIMON will monitor space station astronauts to help assess their emotional states and psychological "group effects," Biniok said.

The data gathered could inform the programming of future robotic assistants, which could in turn aid astronauts and ease the tedium of long journeys to the moon or Mars.

"Social interaction between people and machines, between astronauts and assistance systems equipped with emotional intelligence, could play an important role in the success of long-term missions," Airbus said.

Ultimately, CIMON's technology may even find its way back to the ground.

"We predict that assistance systems of this kind also have a bright future right here on Earth, such as in hospitals or to support nursing care," Biniok said.

In case you were wondering how close we're getting to "2001: A Space Odyssey," no astronauts named "Dave" are scheduled to fly to the space station anytime soon, according to NASA.

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• Facebook is close to acquiring London-based start-up Bloomsbury AI to help it combat fake news, TechCrunch reports.
• Bloomsbury AI develops natural language processing (NLP) technology, and has created an AI called "Cape" which can read documents and then answer questions about their contents.
• Facebook is reportedly paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire the company.

Facebook is set to acquire London-based start-up Bloomsbury AI for up to $30 million (£23 million), according to a TechCrunch report.

Founded in 2015, Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing (NLP) technology, and has developed an AI called "Cape," which can read text documents and answer questions about their contents.

The company's stated goal is for their AI to "[eventually] be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human."

Citing anonymous sources, TechCrunch claims that Facebook plans to use Bloomsbury AI's team and tech to work on combatting fake news, as well as other content issues. It also said Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire the company, and that a mixture of cash and stock will change hands.

Bloomsbury's investors include the VC firm Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the UK taxpayer-backed London Co-Investment fund. It was also selected by Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder which invests in tech start-ups.

One of the firm's angel investors in William Tunstall-Pedoe, an expert in AI who helped develop Amazon's Alexa.

Facebook declined to comment. Business Insider has contacted Bloomsbury AI for comment.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is finally launching a new feature to combat fake news, after six months of testing — here’s how it works

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• In 2017, Anthony Levandowski was in the middle of a scandal involving Uber, his employer at the time, and Waymo, his former employer. He was accused of stealing trade secrets from Google's self-driving car program. 
• Levandowski was fired from Uber, and hasn't been in the public sphere much since the case was settled in early 2018. 
• However, TechCrunch has revealed that Levandowski is tied to an upcoming autonomous truck project, named Kache.ai. 
• Kǎchē means "truck" in Chinese, or "hide" in Haitian Creole, though it's not yet clear what the company's title is referring to. 

Although it may have seemed that Anthony Levandowski was done with the self-driving car business after being fired by Uber in the middle of a trade secrets dispute, it appears he might not be finished yet. 

TechCrunch has discovered that Levandowski is tied to a new self-driving truck company, named Kache.ai, that will focus on commercial trucking. There isn't much information available about the company, and its website currently only features a picture of a lake with the company name imposed over it. Before, the website contained a picture of a commercial truck on a highway with the caption "Kache.ai — The Future of Intelligent Driving."

Kache is staying quiet and didn't respond to TechCrunch about the story — and it's stayed under the radar since being registered as a corporation seven months ago. Levandowski isn't listed anywhere in the corporate filings, but an address that belongs to his father and stepmother is listed in documents filed by Kache to the state. As TechCrunch reports, Levandowski's stepmother, Suzanna Musick, was the CEO of a company he founded called 510 Systems. 

Before the website was scrubbed clean, it contained the following paragraph, explaining that Kache is hiring:

“We’re developing the solution for the next level of on-the-road self-driving trucks," the website read. "Our development philosophy is based on a fast moving, very aggressive agile team approach and we’re seeking both software and hardware engineers that thrive in such an environment.”

Little else is known about Kache at this time, but TechCrunch said multiple sources in the autonomous car industry have confirmed that Levandowski is tied to the company. 

Levandowski was previously at the center of more than a year-long scandal, after Waymo accused him in 2017 of stealing trade secrets and bringing them to Uber. He had worked for Waymo, Google's former self-driving car project, for nearly 10 years before forming a startup, Otto, that was acquired by Uber. In a lawsuit, Waymo said Levandowski stole more than 9 gigabytes of information from them, which included more than 14,000 files related to the self-driving car project, just before he left the company to found Otto. 

Levandowski was fired from Uber, and Uber paid a settlement and agreed not to use any of the information that he had taken from the Waymo project. 

Levandowski also popped up in the news in the middle of the scandal, when he said he was founding a new church centered around worshipping AI called "Way of the Future," which he thinks will soon become god-like and smarter than humans, he said. 

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• In an effort to recruit top talent in artificial intelligence, Oracle offers pay packages worth $6 million, a source told Business Insider.
• In at least one instance, this was enough money to convince a job candidate to join the company and turn down other job offers.

As the battle for artificial intelligence talent heats up in Silicon Valley, word on the street is that larger tech companies are using enormous pay packages to sway candidates away from less well-healed startups. 

Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider. 

That candidate had other job offers but went with Oracle because of the higher pay, the source said. 

We don’t know this unnamed expert’s job title at Oracle, or how many years of experience they brought into the job. From the size of that pay package, however, it seems safe to say that their skill set made them a big catch for Oracle.

Oracle, which has a market cap of $182 billion, has deeper pockets than most. Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, Oracle's co-CEOs, each have annual pay packages worth around $41 million, according to company filings. 

But it's not the only tech giant offering seven-figure packages to top talent.

In October, the New York Times reported that the typical salary for PhD-trained AI talent is around $300,000 to $500,000 in salary and equity, but that some well-known people in the field make double-digit millions — albeit with a four to five year vesting schedule on their stock offerings. With so few experts in the field, and so many companies trying to gain a competitive edge in AI, it's up to companies like Oracle to get competitive. 

Oracle declined to comment. 

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• Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has acquired the team behind London-based start up Bloomsbury AI.
• Rather than a full acquisition of the company, Facebook has taken on Bloomsbury AI's team in what's sometimes called an "acquihire."
• TechCrunch first reported on Monday that Facebook was interested in the company's AI software as a way of combatting fake news on its platform.

Facebook has acquired the team behind Bloomsbury AI, a London-based start-up, the company announced on Tuesday.

Founded in 2015, Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing technology, and has developed an AI called "Cape," which can read documents and then answer questions about their contents.

"The Bloomsbury team has built a leading expertise in machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in natural language in order to answer any question," Facebook said in its announcement. "Their expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications."

The announcement follows a TechCrunch report on Monday that Facebook was in talks to acquire the AI company for up to $30 million (£23 million). TechCrunch's report also claimed that Facebook was interested in Bloomsbury AI's software as a way of combatting fake news and various other content issues on its platform.

Business Insider understands that Facebook is only buying Bloomsbury AI's talent and expertise in a so-called "acquihire", not its product. It isn't clear what will happen to Bloomsbury AI's future operations, though acquihires often result in the closure of the acquired team's company. Business Insider has contacted both companies for clarification.

You can read the full Facebook post here:

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• Adam Weinstein, a former senior employee at LinkedIn, quit last year to start his own data analytics company, Cursor.
• Cursor lets users inside a company search for data across different departments, databases, and platforms.
• The company launched two months ago, and teams at Apple and Slack already use the program.

Adam Weinstein was a senior employee at LinkedIn when he was asked to teach employees in China about the company's data analytics operation, or how the company uses data to make business decisions.

But the task, he found, was more difficult than he anticipated because there wasn't a unified place to find data across different departments, databases, and platforms.

Weinstein cobbled together a basic tool that could do this, which then became used frequently inside LinkedIn. For analysts, he figured, a system that would allow people to easily cull and keep track of data without bouncing off emails to several departments would make their jobs easier — and it could make for a lucrative business opportunity. 

"I talked to lots of folks and I found that the problem we faced at LinkedIn was not unique to us or the technology sector," Weinstein told Business Insider.

After just three years working at LinkedIn, Weinstien quit in March 2017 and founded Cursor, a software company that allows anyone — not just analysts — to search for data across the entire company inside the same program.

Cursor also keeps track of what data people have asked for, thereby reducing duplicate searches. 

"Analysts are on one side of the market. They're the ones the produce the content, get asked questions and write the code," Weinstein said. "On the other side are the people that are asking the questions, and those tend to be data driven leaders from anywhere in the organization. Both are using Cursor to interface with each other."

The company launched in March with $2 million in seed funding from Toba Capital and Ride Ventures. Teams at Apple, Slack, and of course LinkedIn already use the product. 

'They would write a check for this immediately'

Weinstein started working at LinkedIn in 2014 after Bright, an AI-powered recruiting platform where Weinstien led data analytics, was acquired by the company for $134 million. That wasn't Weinstein's first acquisition, though. He also founded his own greeting-card company in 2009 that was eventually acquired by Designer Greetings.

When Weinstien was mulling whether to officially leave LinkedIn after three years, he first made sure the idea behind Cursor was sound. Weinstien met with several high-ranking data employees at companies around Silicon Valley and asked them if Cursor would be something they could use. The answer, Weinstein found, was a resounding yes.

It was only then that Weinstein decided to quit because he realized that he wasn't the only one running into issues with siloed or fragmented data. 

"A lot of them said they would write a check for this immediately," he said. "Even though you have chief data officers and CIOs whose job it is to help deploy technology to help analysts, they haven't done a great job yet on this collaboration problem of how you help people understand what others are doing and capture that in a way they can see it."

Cursor is free for anyone to download because the startup is focusing on "wide adoption" in its early stages. Eventually, the company will start charging large businesses after it starts to take off with analysts.

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This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

One of retailers' top priorities is to figure out how to gain an edge over Amazon. To do this, many retailers are attempting to differentiate themselves by creating highly curated experiences that combine the personal feel of in-store shopping with the convenience of online portals. 

These personalized online experiences are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This is the technology that enables e-commerce websites to recommend products uniquely suited to shoppers, and enables people to search for products using conversational language, or just images, as though they were interacting with a person. 

Using AI to personalize the customer journey could be a huge value-add to retailers. Retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It could also boost profitability rates 59% in the wholesale and retail industries by 2035, according to Accenture. 

In a new report from Business Insider Intelligence, we illustrate the various applications of AI in retail and use case studies to show how this technology has benefited retailers. It assesses the challenges that retailers may face as they implement AI, specifically focusing on technical and organizational challenges. Finally, the report weighs the pros and cons of strategies retailers can take to successfully execute AI technologies in their organization.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Digitally native retailers are setting new standards for the customer journey by creating highly curated experiences through the use of AI. This has enabled them to cater to consumers' desire to interact with mobile apps and websites as they would with an in-store sales representative.
• By mimicking the use of AI among e-commerce pureplays, brick-and-mortars can implement similar levels of personalization. AI can be used to provide personalized websites, tailored product recommendations, more relevant product search results, as well as immediate and useful customer service.
• However, there are several barriers to AI adoption that may make implementation difficult. By and large, these hurdles stem from a general unpreparedness of legacy retailers' systems and organizational structures to handle the huge troves of data AI solutions need to be effective.
• For many retailers, successfully leveraging AI will require partnering with third parties. Because of the barriers involved, employing an in-house strategy can be extremely costly and difficult. This has led to the rise of AI commerce startups, which can provide a more cost-effective approach to overhauling the customer experience.

In full, the report: 

• Provides an overview of the numerous applications of AI in retail, using case studies of how retailers are currently gaining an advantage using this technology. These applications include personalizing online interfaces, tailoring product recommendations, increasing the relevance of shoppers search results, and providing immediate and useful customer service.
• Examines the various challenges that retailers may face when looking to implementing AI, which typically stems from data storage systems being outdated and inflexible, as well as organizational barriers that prevent personalization strategies from being executed effectively.
• Gives two different strategies that retailers can use to successfully implement AI, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy.

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• Sonos, which filed to go public on Friday, has built up a respectable business.
• But the speaker market is undergoing a major shift to smart speakers, and Sonos runs the risk of being relegated to being a secondary player — or being boxed out of the market.
  
• The company's sales growth has already slowed down and it has struggled with red ink.

Sonos has amassed a fervent fan base over the years. But that doesn't mean investors should get overly enthusiastic about the company's stock when it hits the public markets.

The consumer electronics company, which filed on Friday to go public, has carved out a nice niche for itself with its line of wifi connected speakers. But the company's sales growth has moderated from its heyday, and in recent years it's struggled to post a profit. Meanwhile, it's dependent on some of the biggest and most powerful companies in tech for a core new technology that's transforming the home audio market even as it faces growing competition from those same companies.

In other words, I wouldn't bet the house on Sonos — no matter how much you may love its connected speakers.

By some measures, Sonos has built up a respectable business. Since 2013, its sales have nearly doubled to almost $1 billion. Its gross margin — the portion of its sales it has left after accounting for the direct costs of producing its profits — has generally been in the 45% range or higher. That's a healthy figure for a hardware company, indicating that it's able to charge a premium price for its products. It also gives the company plenty of room to spend money on marketing and research-and-development.

Sonos has some fanatical fans

Consumers have been catching on. In the last 12 months, the company sold 4.6 million speakers, more than triple the number it sold in its 2013 fiscal year.

And Sonos' fans really seem to love its products. Of the 6.9 million households that have a registered Sonos speaker, 61% have at least two of the company's products. Some 27% have four or more.

The average customer who starts off with just one Sonos speaker will buy more than two more over time, according to the company. On average, customers who start off with more than one Sonos product initially buy about three at the start and then purchase another two over time.

All that sounds great. But there are signs that Sonos has struggled to build a profitable business outside its niche of geeky audiophiles.

Warning: The best days may be behind it

Most of its sales growth over the last five years happened between Sonos' 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, when its revenue soared 75%. Since then, the company's revenue hasn't grown faster than about 10% on an annual basis.

The bulk of the growth in Sonos' device sales happened in that same period, when they nearly doubled. Ever since, the growth in its product sales have been much more modest, rising just 11% in its last year.

As Sonos' growth slowed, its bottom line deteriorated. The company went from posting a modest profit in fiscal 2014 to a big loss the following year. On an annual basis, it's been operating in the red ever since, although it's gradually improved its bottom line.

Things improved for the company in the first half of its current fiscal year. Sales were up 18% over the same period a year earlier and the company posted a profit for the period. But that improvement could prove to be a chimera.

Sonos' fiscal year ends around the end of September, meaning that its first half includes the all-important holiday season, where it almost certainly gets the bulk of its sales. The company posted a profit for the first half of its fiscal year last year too only to end up posting a full-year loss.

The speaker market is being transformed by "smarts"

Beyond just the numbers, there are bigger reasons to be concerned about Sonos' prospects. Even as the company is hitting the public market, the industry it competes in is changing dramatically.

From when it debuted its first speaker in 2005 until the last year or so, Sonos had the connected speaker market pretty much to itself. If you wanted a whole-home audio system that allowed you to stream music from the internet that you could set up yourself without a custom installer, Sonos was generally the way to go.

But that's no longer the case. Amazon's line of Echo smart speakers offers the same capability. So do Google's Home devices and now Apple's HomePod.

The Echo and the Home weren't initially on par with Sonos' devices in terms of audio quality. But both Amazon and Google last year released new versions of their smart speakers with improved sound. And audio quality is the main selling point of Apple's HomePod.

But all three companies offer something with their speakers that Sonos traditionally hasn't — a built-in intelligent agent. You can control Amazon, Google, and Apple's smart speakers with just your voice. And you can do a lot more with them that than. You can use them to turn on and off your lights, tell you the news and weather, answer trivia questions, and give you the latest sports scores.

The smart speaker market has started to catch fire. In the first quarter of this year, unit sales grew a whopping 210% from the same period last year, according to market research firm Canalys, hitting 9 million worldwide. That's nearly twice as many speakers sold in one quarter as Sonos sold in the last year. Canalys expects worldwide sales of smart speakers to reach 56.3 million this year, up from about 35 million last year and fewer than 10 million in 2016.

That kind of growth obviously far outpaces what Sonos has been doing lately. It also illustrates how smart speakers are starting to dominate the speaker market, just as smartphones pushed aside dumb phones and nearly all televisions are now smart TVs.

Sonos' smart speaker strategy is really risky

Sonos has recognized that market shift toward smart speakers. Last fall, it introduced its first one and it has more in the works.

But there's a big flaw in Sonos' strategy — it doesn't have its own voice-assistant technology. Instead, for now, it's relying on Amazon's Alexa assistant, although it plans to add in Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri in the future.

At best, that will relegate Sonos to being a second fiddle to the big players. When people think of an Amazon-powered smart speaker, they think of the company's Echo line. Sonos faces a huge marketing challenge to make consumers aware that one of its smart speakers can offer the same Alexa assistant that they'd get on an Echo.

Even it's able to do so, it may find it tough convincing customers to pay up for one of its speakers, when they can get an entry-level Echo Dot for $50. That challenge could prove even more difficult when you consider that Amazon has full control over which smart speakers it promotes in its web store — and has taken full advantage of that control to promote its Echo line.

Sonos' reliance on the big tech companies could become more problematic over time. Right now, as Sonos acknowledged in the document it filed to go public, it doesn't pay Amazon anything to use Alexa. But that could change if Amazon ever perceives Sonos' devices to be a competitive threat — or as a potential money-maker

Worse yet for Sonos, Amazon and the other tech companies could just cut Sonos off, leaving it without any voice assistant for its smart speakers — both the ones it's already sold to its customers and any future devices. In fact, according to Sonos' regulatory filing, Amazon can sever ties with the company with only "limited notice."

"If these partners disable the integration of their technology into our products, demand for our products may decrease and our sales may be harmed," Sonos warned investors. "We cannot assure you that the resources we invest in research and development, existing or alternative technology partnerships, marketing and sales will be adequate for us to be successful in establishing and maintaining a large share of the voice-enabled speaker market.

"If we are not able to capture and sustain market share, our future revenue growth will be negatively impacted."

For me, that's good reason to be cautious about Sonos. It may make great speakers. But in the smart-speaker era, it's much more important to have the technology to make them intelligent.

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• Dr. Noam Slonim is the computer scientist who conceived of and helped build "Project Debater," an IBM computer that not only debates humans, it sometimes beats them.
• The effort to build Debater took six years and was fraught with doubt and discouragement for him and his team
• In a exclusive interview with Business Insider, Slonim says that his period writing for TV comedy shows helped prepare him for creating Debater.
•  

A unique, Man vs. Machine battle of wits occurred last month, and Dr. Noam Slonim was the brains behind the winning machine.

Slonim is a former comedy writer turned full-time computer scientist. He conceived of and oversaw the development of "Project Debater," the latest IBM supercomputer capable of understanding and speaking in natural language well enough to not only debate humans, but sometimes defeat them.

Last month, Debater engaged in two debates against humans, prevailing in one of them as judged by the audience, made up largely of San Francisco's tech press. The following day, the computer's rhetorical skills received mostly glowing reviews from the same reporters.

Some of the best minds at some of the biggest tech companies are trying to teach computers to converse with humans-— the stuff of science-fiction. The bet is that sometime soon, people will truly be able to control their PCs and gadgets through conversation.

But creating that kind of sophisticated artificial intelligence isn't easy.

IBM's Debater team toiled for six years before Debater's impressive showing last month, a project that was at times full of disappointment and doubt, Slonim recalled during an exclusive interview with Business Insider. He acknowledged the system, which occasionally drifted off topic or repeated itself during the debates, still has a long way to go.   

Slonim’s own path to success in computer science was also a circuitous one.

He almost ended up in the entertainment industry. Two decades ago, he was one of the writers for The Cameri Quintet, Israel’s equivalent of Saturday Night Live. Later, he helped develop a Seinfeld-esque sitcom. The show didn't stay on the air long and he eventually went back to pursuing his PhD full time.

That shift from comedy to computers turned out to be good for him.

He says that three communication skills, instrumental in both pursuits, can help anyone be more confident when working on what seems like an impossible mission:  1) connecting with people on an emotional level, 2) offering criticism without being cruel 3) learning how to deal with doubt.

A writer's mind

"I found myself in an interesting position," said Slonim, the IBM Research’s principal investigator on Project Debater. "I love machine learning and natural language processing but I also love to write, to be creative in writing. This project allows me to combine these skills."

The whole idea behind Debater was to train the machine to gather ideas, analyze and boil them down and then write arguments based on the information -- much the same way human beings do.

Debater sifts through huge quantities of text to gather information that supports whatever argument the system intends to make. Debater doesn’t just regurgitate other people’s ideas, Slonim said. The computer might pull entire paragraphs, but more typically Debater pulls out single sentences or even clauses from any single text.

Making a convincing argument, however, requires more than just rounding up raw data, according to Slonim.

Slonim and IBM wanted to equip Debater with the ability to connect with an audience on an emotional level. For starters, Debater is trained to recognize human controversy and moral principles. They want the machine to be able to create metaphors and analogies. The system has even been equipped with a digital sense of humor, according to Slonim.

“(Humans) need to look at texts and understand how to build an argument,” Slonim said. “You have to inject humor once in a while.”

Slonim said that having a background in writing was necessary to instill these things into a computer system. He believed that so much that he added a published book author to the Debater team.

Idea exchange

In addition to knowing how to write, it’s a good idea to be a skilled debater oneself before attempting to teach a computer how to do it.

Slonim said that an environment must be created so that colleagues can share ideas and then be enabled to debate those ideas. This is a big part of any collaborative endeavor, be it writing TV shows or building supercomputers.

He said the Debater team often hashes out ideas during jogs in the park, using the time to challenge and defend ideas in a constructive manner.

He added that offering criticism without being cruel is a valuable skill.

Dealing with doubt

Finally, sharing doubts in an open and supportive way can be helpful when setbacks occur.

During Debater’s development, the team experienced some very deep valleys. Doubts that the team could create a debating computer system began to set in. Even Slonim began to question the team’s goals.

Slonim said the problem at times seemed too complex.

"It’s a large team of talented people," Slonim said, "and it took us four years to get Debater to the point to debate in even a (rudimentary) manner. But the hardest part for me was not a technical thing. The hardest part was to believe that this was doable."

He added, "Especially in the beginning, in the first few years people felt it would be hard to make progress and [if] we’re going in the wrong direction and naturally they raised that with me. My wife is a psychologist and she said the most important thing is not to dismiss the doubts but rather share them with the team."

By sharing like that, the team helped buoy each other during the days when nothing seemed to go well, Slonim said.

And the team may yet face more dark days.

Debater is still a work in progress. In addition, artificial intelligence is receiving a lot of scrutiny from those fearful that AI could prove to be a threat to humanity.

"My understanding is that the potential of this technology is huge," said Slonim, who argues Debater might one day become a teaching tool for children.

"We want youngsters to better articulate their arguments, to make more rational decisions, to participate in discussions with peers in a valuable and civilized manner," he said. "We want them to use critical writing and thinking. I truly believe this is going to bring a lot of good to our society."

SEE ALSO: IBM's new AI supercomputer can argue, rebut and debate humans

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• Chia-Lin Simmons is a seasoned veteran in Silicon Valley's tech sphere, with more than 20 years of experience at tech giants like Google and Amazon's Audible.
• Simmons is the founder of a new startup called LookyLoo, which will launch its first product later this year: an AI-powered social platform that helps women find the right fit while shopping for clothing.
• Simmons sold some of her Google stock and pawned the 24-karat gold jewels given to her by her mother to get her startup rolling.
  

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Chia-Lin Simmons doesn't seem like the kind of person to launch a fashion-focused startup. "In my native form, I’m basically in a Google T-shirt and yoga pants talking to engineers," Simmons told Business Insider.

And yet, Simmons is the founder of LookyLoo, an Oakland startup that is wholly centered on fashion. LookyLoo plans to use artificial intelligence to help women identify the proper fit while shopping for clothing, which would let women consult other women on the platform throughout the shopping process. Think of it as having an unbiased opinion at your fingertips when trying something on in a dressing room. 

LookyLoo's platform is in its infancy, with the app slated to go live across the US in September, but Simmons' vision has already gotten some attention — she spoke at San Francisco Design Week in early June about AI's role in the future of retail. 

Simmons has yet to delve into funding rounds for her company, so no money has been raised yet. But to get the ball rolling on LookyLoo's early development, Simmons sold some of her Google stock — and took the 24-karat gold jewels her mother had given her to a San Francisco pawn shop.

“This is how women founders move; we don’t get the benefit of the doubt," Simmons said. 

Simmons' experience in tech spans more than 20 years. She's held executive positions at Amazon's Audible, Time Warner/AOL, and Samsung's connected car business Harman before joining Google's Play division in a global partner marketing role.

“Nobody turns down Google. They’re like the mafia," Simmons said. "They call, you’re like ‘OK.’”

She and her two male cofounders have been around the block of Silicon Valley's tech industry, a field known for being dominated by fresh-eyed and bushy-tailed 20-somethings. (Research firm Statista found the median age amongst Facebook employees to be 28.)

“We’re not 22 and just graduated; we know what it means to build technology," Simmons said.

She'll kick off funding rounds for her company soon, but in the interim, she said she's lucky to have been able to live off of her Google stock and the funds she made from her heirloom gold, a privilege unafforded to the majority of female founders in the startup territory.

"This is where most women’s businesses and startups fail, they don’t get that first vote of validation," Simmons said.

SEE ALSO: Here are 17 of the highest-paying jobs at Google

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• Reporters were allowed on Tuesday to play around with Duplex, the technology that books restaurant reservations or make appointments with a hair salon.
• Google demonstrated Duplex at I/O last month and stunned people when the system showed itself capable of listening and then responding in a human-sounding voice.
• Duplex is still in the testing phase, but Google executives say the system successfully accomplishes it's goal four out of every five calls. 
• It certainly had us fooled.

Google Duplex, the technology that debuted at last month’s I/O conference and simultaneously tickled and frightened people by carrying on brief conversations with humans, pretty much works as advertised.

On Tuesday, members of the media were allowed to test Duplex for themselves. The technology is another of Google’s Assistants' digital valets, built to perform the relatively simple tasks of booking restaurant reservations or making haircut appointments.

Turns out the naysayers and skeptics were wrong. Duplex understands speech and converses with humans in much the same way that Google promised. Still, it's unclear if anyone is interested in turning over these chores to computer systems. If they are, the company is potentially sitting on a hit.

At I/O, Google CEO Sundar Pichai played a recording for the audience of Duplex successfully making a restaurant reservation in such a convincing way — sprinkling "ums" and "ahs" into its speech — that the human on the other end of the line had no idea they were speaking to an automated system.

Some in the I/O audience distrusted what they heard. They accused Google of editing the recording and rigging the demonstration to make Duplex appear more advanced. Others noted that Google had wowed I/O audiences before with whizbang tech — tech that never amounted to much.

Others more convinced by the technology feared that Duplex could conceivably dupe people into believing they were chatting with someone they knew, a potentially big problem.

How we got hands-on with Duplex

During the demo on Tuesday, reporters took turns playing the part of a receptionist or restaurant hostess. Duplex called to book a reservation and reporters asked questions such as "How can I help you?" and "For what day and time?" and "How many people in your party?"

The first thing to know is that Duplex identified itself straightaway as a digital application.

"Hi, I’m calling to make a reservation. I’m an automated booking service so I’ll record the call," Duplex said in a voice that sounded like it came from a twenty-something male. "Can I book a table for Thursday?"

That may not have solved the entire issue of preventing Duplex from being used to impersonate people but it’s not a bad start.

As for the rest of Duplex’s performance, the software smoothly responded to questions and quickly interpreted responses from reporters. The software wasn’t tripped up much by mispronounced words,  stuttering or extended pauses. The demonstration was nearly perfect.

Duplex got into trouble once, when David Pierce of The Wall Street Journal, purposely threw it a curveball and repeated back erroneous dates for a reservation. Duplex reacted as it was programmed to do in such situations: By alerting one of Google’s human operators who got on the line and completed the booking.

In Duplex’s testing stage, Google has operators standing by to take over whenever a conversation goes off track, said Nick Fox, vice president of product design and Scott Huffman, vice president of engineering.

According to them, Duplex is successful four out of every five calls.

It’s hard to believe Google won’t have a higher failure rate, at least initially. Once people learn that they’re talking to software, there are bound to be many who will try to mess with this technology.

Google is prepared.

Managers have programmed Duplex to try and steer conversations to the designated task if the human on the line begins to stray off topic. If it fails to achieve this, the software will call on one of the human operators to take over.

Initially, users will use their phones and an app to key in dates, times, and other information needed to make a reservation or appointment. Then Duplex will take over and make the call. Once the reservation is booked, the system will notify the user. Google said the focus for the project was to "help people get things done."

As for when consumers might get their chance to play with Duplex, Google didn’t say exactly but managers hinted that it may be as soon as this summer.

SEE ALSO: Google insiders say the final version of Duplex, the stunning AI bot that sounded so real it fooled humans, may be purposefully made less scary

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• Legal tech startup Everlaw has raised $25 million in a series B funding round led by new investor Menlo Ventures, with participation from existing investor and famed Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.
• CEO and founder AJ Shankar said the company wants to invest more in artificial intelligence.
• Everlaw has doubled revenue year over year in the last two years, and is now being used by every US state attorney in all 50 states.

Berkeley, California-based legal-tech startup Everlaw has raised $25 million in a series B funding round led by new investor Menlo Ventures, with participation from existing investor and high-profile venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced Thursday.

Everlaw is a cloud-based e-discovery platform that lets lawyers easily organize and search through millions of documents, videos, emails, and pictures exchanged between legal teams before a trial. In big cases, terabytes of data are passed between lawyers and without software, it can take hundreds of hours for paralegals to comb through them.

In an interview with Business Insider, founder and CEO AJ Shankar said the money will be used to invest in artificial intelligence, which the platform already uses in some capacity to suggest — using data from past behavior — what documents it thinks will be a priority or what documents should be looked at next.

Eventually, Shankar says, he wants Everlaw to be able to surface those suggestions instantly from the initial upload as well as derive intelligence about user behavior across multiple cases.

"The harder problem we're trying to solve is what we can understand about this giant corpus of data without users even telling us anything," Shankar said. "Forget legal, that's a hard problem in AI in general."

The company declined to disclose its valuation, but it has seen huge success with revenue, which it says has doubled in the last two years. Shankar added that Everlaw is in "growth mode," so the company is cash-flow neutral and not profitable right now.

All 50 states

Shankar founded Everlaw after getting a computer-science degree from the University of California, Berkeley. While he was a student, he acted as a consultant for a local law firm on technical issues and used both his engineering knowledge and familiarity with law firms to start Everlaw in 2011. 

There's already several e-discovery platforms on the market, but those legacy systems are at times clunky and expensive, Shankar said. Indeed, according to some estimates, e-discovery can account for up to 70% of the total cost of a lawsuit. Plus, Everlaw is only one of a handful of e-discovery platforms heavily investing in sophisticated artificial intelligence, something Shankar said gives Everlaw an edge.

Everlaw is also differentiating itself with a handy "post-review" feature called StoryBuilder. The tool lets users who aren't directly looking through the documents to organize particular information and evidence into a narrative that can be used at trial. It cuts down the feedback loop between the people doing the discovery component and the people building the case. 

"That way of litigating, we think it's really powerful," Shankar said.

Since Everlaw can handle huge cases, the company is marketing itself toward medium and large law firms, gaining customers from top-tier firms. Unlike Logikcull, another leading cloud-based e-discovery platform that has recently gotten attention from Silicon Valley, Everlaw isn't going after people representing themselves, or mom-and-pop law firms.

Everlaw is now being used by the US state attorney general offices in all 50 states. At first, it was only used in a handful them, but when attorneys general started working together on multi-district cases, word spread and eventually the platform was adopted by all of them.

"In these major litigations, we're a major, if not the best contender they got," Shankar said. "It's been a great viral growth opportunity for us."

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Google just added a new "Out of office" feature to its Calendar app to make meeting management a little easier. 

Similar to Google's Vacation Responder feature in Gmail, which can send automated replies while you're away from your computer, the new Out of office feature lets you preemptively deny meeting requests for certain periods of time on your Google Calendar. Google announced the feature in a blog post on Thursday, saying it will "further improve your digital well-being."

The way that Out of office messages are set up right now, incoming emails and invites automatically receive an "I can't respond right now," but only once you're out of the office. With this feature — which can be applied to day-to-day hours or for vacation days — the creator of the meeting will know you'll be unavailable on that day and time as soon as he or she makes the meeting. 

That leaves you to get on with your work and your personal life, by avoiding the repeated conversation about your hours and travel time. 

Here's how to set up the Out of office feature in Google Calendar:

For one-off times — say, when you're going out of town or need to go heads down on an assignment — click on a day like you would for an event or a reminder, and select the Out of office mode. Then fill in the rest of the necessary information.

When I typed "Vacation" into the title field, Google automatically changed the event to the Out of office mode with a pop-up explaining itself: "Going out of office? Use Out of office to create auto declining events."

"Going forward, Google Calendar will try to intelligently detect, based on the title entered, when you’re creating an out of office object and change the type automatically," Google said in the blog post. "You can always manually change this if you’d like to opt for a different entry type."

Note that even though you are creating an event like you would any other, the "Create event" shortcut in the bottom right-hand corner (that red plus sign) won't work. It's for events only.

The days will appear differently in your 'Week' view, and any meetings previously created will be declined.

If you change your mind or schedule incorrectly, don't worry — once you delete the time off, Google Calendar automatically re-accepts anything that was declined. 

Google Calendar will also decline incoming meetings requests for those days with an email that includes your tailor-made message. Here's what it looks like on their end:

Apple's Siri is apparently the market leader for mobile voice assistants, beating out popular players like Google's Assistant.

This may come as a surprise to some, since Android has a much larger share of the market and Siri is often considered inferior in terms of user experience and capabilities. But Google has been struggling to build awareness about its smart assistant (Google Assistant is on 400 million Android devices as of 2017, according to Voicebot.ai) and as this chart from Statista shows, Siri's first-to-market strategy has made it tough for others to catch up.

Also interesting here is Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana's high rankings, considering neither one is automatically integrated into a smartphone. Alexa's particularly impressive 10% share accounts for the people who use the voice assistant through the Alexa app in order to access their Echo smart speakers — a capability that wasn't even possible until 2017. Cortana, meanwhile, can now only be bought in the Google Play Store. 

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• SpaceX launched a Dragon cargo ship toward the International Space Station on Friday.
• In addition to supplies, the spaceship will deliver an artificially intelligent robotic head to astronauts.
• The 11-pound robot is called Crew Interactive Mobile Companion (CIMON).
• CIMON can fly around and will use IBMWatson software to talk with an animated face and interact with astronauts.

Just before dawn on Friday, SpaceX launched a spaceship with nearly 6,000 lbs of cargo to the International Space Station.

The Dragon ship is slated to reach the ISS on Monday and is mostly filled with science experiments, food, water, and other supplies. But the mission contains a few extra goodies for astronauts, including a flying, talking, interactive robotic head.

The orb-shaped device is called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, and weighs about 11 pounds. It will use microphones and cameras to record astronauts, has an expressive digital face, and can even make small talk.

"CIMON will be the first [artificial intelligence]-based mission and flight assistance system," Manfred Jaumann, a payload engineer at Airbus (which helped build the robot), said in a press release. He added that CIMON will be a "a free flyer, a kind of flying brain" that will interact with, aid, and learn from astronauts.

Though CIMON is a far cry from the HAL 9000 supercomputer in the classic sci-fi book and movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," its capabilities are nonetheless impressive.

The machine's "brain" is powered by a version of IBM Watson — the software that famously defeated "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 to win $1 million.

The CIMON project aims explore how astronauts get along with artificially intelligent beings for extended periods of time, according to NASA's pre-flight briefing materials.

Training a floating head to be a friend

CIMON was created primarily by the German Aerospace Center, in collaboration with IBM, the European Space Agency, and other partners.

At first, the robot's only friend will be German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who launched to the space station on June 6. CIMON's team trained the robot to recognize Gerst's voice via microphones and his face using cameras. In orbit, the machine will follow Gerst around like a puppy, using an air-propulsion system.

The robot has a stand-alone version of Watson AI in its memory banks. That means CIMON can interpret data, respond to commands, solve problems, and generally be a useful little robot without any internet connection — a tricky problem in space.

Gerst will unbox CIMON sometime after Monday and use the flying robot through October. During that time, it will help Gerst solve basic problems and check off tasks like a digital assistant.

CIMON has three big missions to do, according to Airbus. One is to guide Gerst through a crystal-growth experiment. The second is for CIMON to look at a Rubik's cube through its camera and give Gerst instructions for how to solve it. The final task is to record and assist Gerst while he performs a complex medical experiment.

"Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps," Matthias Biniok, the lead Watson architect in Germany, wrote in an IBM blog post. He said "CIMON knows them all" — so astronauts shouldn't have to worry as much about missing a step.

In addition to helping with experiments, CIMON is equipped with sensors that can alert astronauts to dangerous conditions when they're not near a computer console.

"It can also serve as an early warning system for technical problems," Airbus said.

A model for artificially intelligent astronaut assistants?

CIMON will use a neural network to interact with and learn from Gerst, at least at first.

Ultimately, CIMON will monitor space station astronauts to help assess their emotional states and psychological "group effects," Biniok said.

The data gathered could inform the programming of future robotic assistants, which could in turn aid astronauts and ease the tedium of long journeys to the moon or Mars.

"Social interaction between people and machines, between astronauts and assistance systems equipped with emotional intelligence, could play an important role in the success of long-term missions," Airbus said.

Ultimately, CIMON's technology may even find its way back to the ground.

"We predict that assistance systems of this kind also have a bright future right here on Earth, such as in hospitals or to support nursing care," Biniok said.

In case you were wondering how close we're getting to "2001: A Space Odyssey," no astronauts named "Dave" are scheduled to fly to the space station anytime soon, according to NASA.

SEE ALSO: I watched SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket thunder into space for the first time — here's what it was like on the ground

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• Facebook is close to acquiring London-based start-up Bloomsbury AI to help it combat fake news, TechCrunch reports.
• Bloomsbury AI develops natural language processing (NLP) technology, and has created an AI called "Cape" which can read documents and then answer questions about their contents.
• Facebook is reportedly paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire the company.

Facebook is set to acquire London-based start-up Bloomsbury AI for up to $30 million (£23 million), according to a TechCrunch report.

Founded in 2015, Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing (NLP) technology, and has developed an AI called "Cape," which can read text documents and answer questions about their contents.

The company's stated goal is for their AI to "[eventually] be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human."

Citing anonymous sources, TechCrunch claims that Facebook plans to use Bloomsbury AI's team and tech to work on combatting fake news, as well as other content issues. It also said Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire the company, and that a mixture of cash and stock will change hands.

Bloomsbury's investors include the VC firm Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the UK taxpayer-backed London Co-Investment fund. It was also selected by Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder which invests in tech start-ups.

One of the firm's angel investors in William Tunstall-Pedoe, an expert in AI who helped develop Amazon's Alexa.

Facebook declined to comment. Business Insider has contacted Bloomsbury AI for comment.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is finally launching a new feature to combat fake news, after six months of testing — here’s how it works

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• In 2017, Anthony Levandowski was in the middle of a scandal involving Uber, his employer at the time, and Waymo, his former employer. He was accused of stealing trade secrets from Google's self-driving car program. 
• Levandowski was fired from Uber, and hasn't been in the public sphere much since the case was settled in early 2018. 
• However, TechCrunch has revealed that Levandowski is tied to an upcoming autonomous truck project, named Kache.ai. 
• Kǎchē means "truck" in Chinese, or "hide" in Haitian Creole, though it's not yet clear what the company's title is referring to. 

Although it may have seemed that Anthony Levandowski was done with the self-driving car business after being fired by Uber in the middle of a trade secrets dispute, it appears he might not be finished yet. 

TechCrunch has discovered that Levandowski is tied to a new self-driving truck company, named Kache.ai, that will focus on commercial trucking. There isn't much information available about the company, and its website currently only features a picture of a lake with the company name imposed over it. Before, the website contained a picture of a commercial truck on a highway with the caption "Kache.ai — The Future of Intelligent Driving."

Kache is staying quiet and didn't respond to TechCrunch about the story — and it's stayed under the radar since being registered as a corporation seven months ago. Levandowski isn't listed anywhere in the corporate filings, but an address that belongs to his father and stepmother is listed in documents filed by Kache to the state. As TechCrunch reports, Levandowski's stepmother, Suzanna Musick, was the CEO of a company he founded called 510 Systems. 

Before the website was scrubbed clean, it contained the following paragraph, explaining that Kache is hiring:

“We’re developing the solution for the next level of on-the-road self-driving trucks," the website read. "Our development philosophy is based on a fast moving, very aggressive agile team approach and we’re seeking both software and hardware engineers that thrive in such an environment.”

Little else is known about Kache at this time, but TechCrunch said multiple sources in the autonomous car industry have confirmed that Levandowski is tied to the company. 

Levandowski was previously at the center of more than a year-long scandal, after Waymo accused him in 2017 of stealing trade secrets and bringing them to Uber. He had worked for Waymo, Google's former self-driving car project, for nearly 10 years before forming a startup, Otto, that was acquired by Uber. In a lawsuit, Waymo said Levandowski stole more than 9 gigabytes of information from them, which included more than 14,000 files related to the self-driving car project, just before he left the company to found Otto. 

Levandowski was fired from Uber, and Uber paid a settlement and agreed not to use any of the information that he had taken from the Waymo project. 

Levandowski also popped up in the news in the middle of the scandal, when he said he was founding a new church centered around worshipping AI called "Way of the Future," which he thinks will soon become god-like and smarter than humans, he said. 

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• Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has acquired the team behind London-based start up Bloomsbury AI.
• Rather than a full acquisition of the company, Facebook has taken on Bloomsbury AI's team in what's sometimes called an "acquihire."
• TechCrunch first reported on Monday that Facebook was interested in the company's AI software as a way of combatting fake news on its platform.

Facebook has acquired the team behind Bloomsbury AI, a London-based start-up, the company announced on Tuesday.

Founded in 2015, Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing technology, and has developed an AI called "Cape," which can read documents and then answer questions about their contents.

"The Bloomsbury team has built a leading expertise in machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in natural language in order to answer any question," Facebook said in its announcement. "Their expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications."

The announcement follows a TechCrunch report on Monday that Facebook was in talks to acquire the AI company for up to $30 million (£23 million). TechCrunch's report also claimed that Facebook was interested in Bloomsbury AI's software as a way of combatting fake news and various other content issues on its platform.

Business Insider understands that Facebook is only buying Bloomsbury AI's talent and expertise in a so-called "acquihire", not its product. It isn't clear what will happen to Bloomsbury AI's future operations, though acquihires often result in the closure of the acquired team's company. Business Insider has contacted both companies for clarification.

You can read the full Facebook post here:

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• Adam Weinstein, a former senior employee at LinkedIn, quit last year to start his own data analytics company, Cursor.
• Cursor lets users inside a company search for data across different departments, databases, and platforms.
• The company launched two months ago, and teams at Apple and Slack already use the program.

Adam Weinstein was a senior employee at LinkedIn when he was asked to teach employees in China about the company's data analytics operation, or how the company uses data to make business decisions.

But the task, he found, was more difficult than he anticipated because there wasn't a unified place to find data across different departments, databases, and platforms.

Weinstein cobbled together a basic tool that could do this, which then became used frequently inside LinkedIn. For analysts, he figured, a system that would allow people to easily cull and keep track of data without bouncing off emails to several departments would make their jobs easier — and it could make for a lucrative business opportunity. 

"I talked to lots of folks and I found that the problem we faced at LinkedIn was not unique to us or the technology sector," Weinstein told Business Insider.

After just three years working at LinkedIn, Weinstien quit in March 2017 and founded Cursor, a software company that allows anyone — not just analysts — to search for data across the entire company inside the same program.

Cursor also keeps track of what data people have asked for, thereby reducing duplicate searches. 

"Analysts are on one side of the market. They're the ones the produce the content, get asked questions and write the code," Weinstein said. "On the other side are the people that are asking the questions, and those tend to be data driven leaders from anywhere in the organization. Both are using Cursor to interface with each other."

The company launched in March with $2 million in seed funding from Toba Capital and Ride Ventures. Teams at Apple, Slack, and of course LinkedIn already use the product. 

'They would write a check for this immediately'

Weinstein started working at LinkedIn in 2014 after Bright, an AI-powered recruiting platform where Weinstien led data analytics, was acquired by the company for $134 million. That wasn't Weinstein's first acquisition, though. He also founded his own greeting-card company in 2009 that was eventually acquired by Designer Greetings.

When Weinstien was mulling whether to officially leave LinkedIn after three years, he first made sure the idea behind Cursor was sound. Weinstien met with several high-ranking data employees at companies around Silicon Valley and asked them if Cursor would be something they could use. The answer, Weinstein found, was a resounding yes.

It was only then that Weinstein decided to quit because he realized that he wasn't the only one running into issues with siloed or fragmented data. 

"A lot of them said they would write a check for this immediately," he said. "Even though you have chief data officers and CIOs whose job it is to help deploy technology to help analysts, they haven't done a great job yet on this collaboration problem of how you help people understand what others are doing and capture that in a way they can see it."

Cursor is free for anyone to download because the startup is focusing on "wide adoption" in its early stages. Eventually, the company will start charging large businesses after it starts to take off with analysts.

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• In an effort to recruit top talent in artificial intelligence, Oracle offers pay packages worth $6 million, a source told Business Insider.
• In at least one instance, this was enough money to convince a job candidate to join the company and turn down other job offers.

As the battle for artificial intelligence talent heats up in Silicon Valley, word on the street is that larger tech companies are using enormous pay packages to sway candidates away from less well-heeled startups. 

Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider. 

That candidate had other job offers but went with Oracle because of the higher pay, the source said. 

We don’t know this unnamed expert’s job title at Oracle, or how many years of experience they brought into the job. From the size of that pay package, however, it seems safe to say that their skill set made them a big catch for Oracle.

Oracle, which has a market cap of $182 billion, has deeper pockets than most. Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, Oracle's co-CEOs, each have annual pay packages worth around $41 million, according to company filings. 

But it's not the only tech giant offering seven-figure packages to top talent.

In October, the New York Times reported that the typical salary for PhD-trained AI talent is around $300,000 to $500,000 in salary and equity, but that some well-known people in the field make double-digit millions — albeit with a four to five year vesting schedule on their stock offerings. With so few experts in the field, and so many companies trying to gain a competitive edge in AI, it's up to companies like Oracle to get competitive. 

Oracle declined to comment. 

SEE ALSO: Oracle changed the way it reports revenue a day after announcing its annual results and analysts say there has been 'confusion'

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