Yep, I said it. Modern AI is dumber than we may perceive. But humans are as well. This week I had an interesting conversation around intelligence. It originated from a thought expressed in Nassim Taleb’s book “Fooled By Randomness”. In his book, Nassim proposes the introduction of a “Reverse Turing Test”. A Turing test labels a machine is “intelligent” if it can be mistaken for a human. In the reverse Turing test, a human is “unintelligent” if a machine can replicate his/her writing....

I love heavy metal. I spent most of my teenage years in my room, practicing on my guitar Metallica’s songs. I had to play as fast and hard as them. When I was 17, my family moved to another town and I had to change guitar teacher. By that time, I was able to play every Metallica song I wanted. I thought that it was enough to make me a great guitar player, but my new teacher Claudio didn’t agree with me....

I’ve lived outside of my home country for 5 years. That means that for 5 years I’ve bought groceries, asked for directions, made friends, argued, dated and a bunch of other stuff in a language that is not my mother tongue. Not speaking your mother tongue can be hard and scary. Try chopping vegetables with your non-dominant hand. It feels weird, right? That’s more or less how it can feel to deal with some aspects of life in a language that is not yours....

I’m always amazed by the power of smell. Some smells are radically wired into our brains, connected to memories, events, and the people we love. Easter mornings to me are the smell of “pastiera”: a traditional Italian sweet from the city of Naples, where my mum was born. That smell has the power of bringing me back to my family home’s bed during Easter mornings, where I’d be woken up by the smell of my favourite cake being baked by my mum since the early morning....

Defining a good AI project is a fascinating challenge. Unless you’re doing pure research, it requires you to find a strong intersection between business and technology. Finding that intersection is hard for many reasons. Today I want to focus on a specific one: the two worlds of business and technology are often in the hands of different people within an organization, and making them work together effectively isn’t trivial. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a hypothetical pharmaceutical company, Acme Bio (what we’ll say applies to every industry)....