Axios

Fox News announced today that ratings giant Bill O'Reilly will no longer appear on its network, another major move for the top cable channel, which split ways with Roger Ailes in July.

Update: Bill Shine, who served as co-president since the Murdoch family ousted Ailes, resigned on May 1.

Below, a full timeline of how we got here.

The Murdoch family has decided Bill O'Reilly has got to go, according to NYMag's Gabriel Sherman, who is probably the best-sourced reporter on Fox News.

• Next steps: Fox execs are meeting this morning to figure out an exit plan, and the parent company's board meets on Thursday.
• Sticking points: Cash — Roger Ailes got $40 million, and O'Reilly has a contract that pays $20 million a year — and whether O'Reilly gets to go back on air to say goodbye to his viewers.
• Potential successors: Eric Bolling, Dana Perino and Tucker Carlson, per Sherman.

Atomwise, a San Francisco-based biotech startup, is trying to use artificial intelligence to cut the development time for new drugs — and it's launching a new project today to help researchers do that. It's inviting scientists to apply for quick screenings using its AI technology. The company will test millions of molecules for up to 100 labs, find out which ones are most likely to work on a disease or protein, and then ship 72 customized compounds to each lab for testing.

What they're trying to solve: Drug companies often talk about the time and expense it takes to develop and win approval for a new drug — the commonly cited statistics are $2.6 billion and 15 years. Atomwise says it's trying to cut that time by using AI to speed up the beginning of the process. If it works, the time from the idea stage to clinical trials will be "significantly shorter" and "the success of the clinical trials will be greater," said Dr. Han Lim, who's in charge of academic partnerships for the startup.

A firestorm of reports from credible journalists surfaced Tuesday, all pointing to the same conclusion: The Murdoch support that has been keeping primetime anchor Bill O'Reilly at the network is waning, and reports could surface by the end of the week that the O'Reilly Factor star will likely not return to his primetime seat after his Italian vacation.

Why it matters: News reports and advertisers moved Fox before Fox moved O'Reilly.

The tea leaves: Axios' Mike Allen reports that corporate execs would love to bring in an outside, non-political big name from another network.

Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence and cognitive systems will rise to $46 billion in 2020, up 768% from 2016, according to a new analysis by International Data Corporation.

Data: IDS Research; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

Why it matters: These data show that artificial intelligence is not just a curiosity or a thought experiment, but technology that is spreading fast to businesses that average Americans interact with every day. IDC says business spending in this category in 2017 will be primarily on diagnosis and treatment systems; automated customer service; and fraud analysis and investigation. The financial services, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare industries are expected to most aggressively deploy AI over the next few years.

The never-ending debate over net neutrality has long had pretty predictable fault lines. Internet providers like AT&T and Comcast say overly strict rules are bad for business, while tech companies like Google and Netflix argue rules are needed to keep an even playing field for web content.

As the internet industry has matured, the companies that used to be tiny start-ups at the mercy of the networks are now heavyweights. While that doesn't mean tech giants will stay on the sidelines — an influential trade group has already strongly defended the rules — startups are expected to help lead the charge against efforts to roll back existing rules.

Why it matters: Pushback from both big and small Silicon Valley players would complicate FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's expected efforts to dismantle the agency's 2015 net neutrality rules. Tech employee outrage could also add juice to activist opposition.

After a steep rise following the financial crisis, U.S. retail jobs have been plummeting since the start of the year.

Why this matters: The likely irreversible plunge in these relatively low-wage jobs — $18-an-hour employment for teens, adults, immigrants and senior citizens for generations — primarily affects the working class people whose shrinking opportunities have underpinned populist politics in the U.S. and abroad. And the jobs being created in their stead, in online warehouses for companies like Amazon, are too few to soak up those displaced.

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber—who has contributed to various AI innovations like speech-recognition technology—predicts artificial intelligence will surpass that of humans by the year 2050. "[AI] will see little point in getting stuck to our bit of the biosphere," he tells the Guardian in an interview Tuesday. "They will want to move history to the next level and march out to where the resources are. In a couple of million years, they will have colonised the Milky Way."

What happens before that? Schmidhuber is building an electronic brain consisting of one billion neurons—or one one thousandth the number contained in the human cortex. He calls his project "true AI," one that can function much like a baby by "setting themselves little experiments in order to understand how the world works," according to the Guardian. "We aren't that many years away from an animal-like intelligence, like that of a crow or a capuchin monkey," he says.

Not everyone is convinced: One scientist told the Guardian that Schmidhuber is setting up AI to disappoint, much like the vaunted Segway, which was promoted as an invention as important as the PC, but ended up at best a niche product, and at worst a laughingstock.

Petsmart announced Tuesday it is buying online rival Chewy.com in a deal that values the online pet food seller at $3.35 billion, according to Recode.

Chewy will remain led by current CEO Ryan Cohen and operate "largely" as an independent subsidiary of PetSmart, whatever that means.

Big Bite: The reported price tag would make the deal larger than Walmart's Jet purchase and the biggest e-commerce-only acquisition ever, Recode said.

A former clerical worker at Fox News has alleged that Bill O'Reilly sexually and racially harassed her according to attorney Lisa Bloom, who is representing the unnamed accuser. The woman claims O'Reilly used to "leer at her" and "grunt at her like a wild boar." He also used to call her "hot chocolate," Bloom told The Hollywood Reporter

The other side: Former Fox News producer Joe Muto weighed into the reports on Twitter: "As much as it pains me to defend him, this is bullshit. I sat 15ft from his office door from 2007-2012. No one like this woman was nearby."

Why this matters: There are now seven women accusing O'Reilly of sexual harassment, and with advertisers abandoning "The O'Reilly Factor," the Murdochs are reportedly "leaning toward" taking him off the air.

Workers at Tesla Grohmann Automation—the car company's robotics unit headquartered in Germany, are threatening to go on strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to IG Metall, the union representing Tesla Grohmann workers, Tesla is paying 30% below union wages following reforms it enacted after buying the company last year. Tesla disputes these numbers.

Why it matters: Telsa's acquisition of Grohmann Automation last November is a keystone of the carmaker's attempts to cost-effectively ramp up production from roughly 80,000 vehicles last year to 500,000 in 2018. Tesla said following the acquisition that the unit would design and produce "several critical elements of Tesla's automated manufacturing systems," which the firm calls "the machine that builds the machine."

Rates of increase in digital media consumption continue to slow, according to projections by eMarketer.

What it means: Because the number of hours in a day doesn't increase, media consumption becomes a zero-sum game. Per eMarketer, "increased time spent with one medium will tend to come at the expense of time spent with another." Slowing digital growth could mean users aren't ready to fully give up other mediums (radio, TV, print, etc.).

Data: eMarketer; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

Here's how Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt began her interview with the President and First Lady at yesterday's White House Easter Egg Roll:

1. "Congratulations Mr. President and Mrs. First Lady for this wonderful event, you're the hostess of this."
2. "That's wonderful. What's the best part about planning an event like this? Your first event."
3. "And to be here with your whole family. How was Easter [to POTUS]?"
4. "Can we talk politics, a little news right now?"

Better than the guidelines doctors use, in fact. That's the conclusion of a new study written up in Science magazine. Here's how they tested it: A UK epidemiologist and his colleagues tested four machine-learning algorithms against the doctors' guidelines, to see how well they could predict which patients would have heart troubles based on 2005 medical records. Sure enough, the artificial intelligence programs did a better job of predicting who actually had heart attacks and other problems within the next 10 years.