Axios

An AI program designed by the Microsoft-acquired Maluuba has achieved the first perfect score of 999,900 on the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man, per The Verge.

In 35 years, the best score achieved by a human is 266,330.

The method: The AI breaks up different portions of the game — like collecting pellets or avoiding ghosts — into 163 smaller chunks, assigning each task to an "agent." Each agent then submits its recommendation to a "senior manager," which makes the ultimate decision on how to move in the game. For example, the senior manager will always choose to avoid a ghost over collecting additional pellets.

The applications: Microsoft says this strategy of aggregating small-scale recommendations to achieve a large-scale goal can be applied to natural language processing or helping a company sift through sales leads.

CenturyLink, one of the country's largest telecommunications providers, has a new employee, Harvard Business Review reports. She is Angie, who sends around 30,000 emails a day, identifies hot leads, sets up sales appointments, and then transfers the conversation to said sales rep.

Angie is artificial intelligence-powered, and has made CenturyLink $20 in new customer contracts for every dollar spent on her.

CenturyLink isn't alone: Other companies like Epson America and RapidMiner are using AI assistants, too. "AI tools are the only way I can scale 'helpfulness' to a global community of 200,000-plus users with a team of two," one chief marketing officer told HBR.

The Federal Reserve will raise the rate at which banks borrow 0.25% to 1.125%, the fourth such increase since December of 2015. The move was announced Wednesday following the Fed's June meeting, and suggests Fed Chair Janet Yellen thinks the steadily falling unemployment rate will soon spark faster wage growth and overall price increases.

Not so fast: The board's statement was more cautious than the one it issued in March — reflecting the fact that core inflation growth has fallen for three straight months, a trend Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics calls "alarming, but not definitive." In other words, the Fed is currently sticking to its belief that inflation is going to accelerate this year — and that they must raise rates to head it off — but incoming data could cause it to abandon that view before July's meeting.

What it means for workers: The Fed thinks the U.S. economy is at full employment, and that significant further declines in the unemployment rate could spark a dangerous inflationary cycle. The concern is that low joblessness forces employers to pay higher wages, which then ups prices for products and services throughout the economy.

Goldman Sachs is automating the work previously done by associates earning $326,000 a year, and Bloomberg reports that half of the tasks needed to prepare for an IPO can be done by algorithms as well.

According to a recent study by the bank, half of the 127 tasks done to prepare for initial public offerings of stock can be automated.

Why it matters: Investment banking is another job on a growing list of high-paid work that is being automated, along with legal services and medicine.

Why it may not (technically) kill jobs: Goldman swears that this technology won't reduce headcount, but will instead free bankers to focus on tasks like shaping marketing strategy and spending time with clients. But it also says that it has eliminated thousands of hours of human work, which will reduce the need to increase its headcount going forward.

Uber is in the prediction business, but it wants to get better. So the company's artificial intelligence team has proposed a new algorithm that it says improves its forecasting of demand in extreme situations like bad weather and major holidays.

Uber researchers are applying a machine-learning architecture called "long short-term memory" (LSTM) to predict demand for drivers during "holidays, concerts, inclement weather, and sporting events." In a new blog post, they said that this new approach improved the accuracy of their existing forecasting algorithm between 2% and 18%.

Why it matters: Better AI forecasting models could impact fields as diverse as medicine and earthquake prediction. The latest craze among hedge funders is using LSTM architecture to predict asset price changes.

Publishers are leaving Medium, the crowdsourced-based content platform, amid business changes that make It harder for them to make money. Most notably in the last month, Bill Simmon's sports/culture blog The Ringer moved to Vox and Condé Nast's tech blog BackChannel moved to Wired.

Why it matters: Medium's long-term solution to this problem is to wait until its subscription model is out of beta and revenues will go up. But their interim strategy of retaining publishers despite having no short-term revenue plan is failing. Medium's struggle is shared by other internet publishers struggling to figure out how to build a sustainable long-term subscription model while ad revenues collapse in the wake of Facebook and Google's dominance.

China's increasing investments in artificial intelligence are attracting top scientific talent to the country and bolstering concerns in the United States about brain drain and corporate espionage as the nations face off in a battle — largely taking place in boardrooms and banks — to dominate cutting-edge technology.

What is happening: The United States wants to strengthen its ability to scrutinize Chinese investment in American tech companies, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, per Reuters.

Why it matters: China appears to be outspending the U.S. to be at the forefront of artificial intelligence just as the Trump administration is slashing government research funding. U.S. officials worry that some of America's most cutting-edge companies could become beholden to the whims of a foreign adversary, and that the outcome will be China overwhelming the U.S. with soft power.