There's a high-stakes race among the biggest tech companies, from Google to Amazon, to stake out turf in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market.

But ask IBM, and it will tell you it has the home-field advantage.

After all, in 1957, the company helped prove that AI had practical uses when it programmed an IBM 704 to play checkers and to learn from its experiences. In 2011, an IBM super-computer named Watson became the champ of the TV trivia game show "Jeopardy."

And although IBM's focus is on technology for enterprise customers, rather than direct to consumer products, the 107-year-old company is not about to let its AI reputation be stolen by upstarts like Google, Facebook, Amazon.

On Monday, IBM announced that it has released AI specially "pre-trained" for nine industries, including human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, and advertising.

These AI tools, part of the Watson Decision Platform, come pre-programmed to understand the language, tasks and challenges of each industry. The pre-trained AI still allows customers to customize for their specific situation. Among the companies already signed up are H&R Block, Ingersoll Rand, and Subway.

Earlier this month, IBM launched a new tool that scans AI software and uncovers all kinds of nasty bias. If an insurance company isn't giving loans to members of a particular minority group, this tool will unearth it.

David Kenny, senior vice president of IBM Cognitive Solutions, told Business Insider that IBM's AI has more than 16,000 applications applied in more than 20 industries and across 80 countries.

The IBM team that participated in the June 2018 debate that saw two experienced debaters compete against IBM's AI system (center). Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

"AI is becoming a better way for people to make decisions," Kenny said. "We are focused on helping businesses improve their work flows and get more out of all their data."

For IBM, all the attention paid to the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon over their AI efforts must be strange. Part of that is due to the skill the tech companies have in putting on a good show.

Google Home and Amazon Alexa are consumer AI, digital assistants that speak with their owners. This is the kind of futuristic tech that sparks the public's imagination. In May, when Google unveiled Duplex, the appointment-making software that can carry on conversations in a human-sounding voice, the tech press couldn't write enough.

That doesn't rattle IBM's brass says Kenny. First of all, IBM has also showcased its own talking AI, called Debater, that received a lot of positive press. Secondly, much of what the other guys are doing involves consumers.

IBM has some experience with consumer goods. The company was once among the dominant PC makers. But that was an anomaly for the company, according to Kenny. With AI, Big Blue has its sights squarely on the enterprise market, an area where it has more than a century of experience.

See Also: A former TV comedy writer learned three ways to succeed at impossible tasks when he taught an IBM computer how to argue

"The digital assistants are in a big, broad market," Kenny said. "I don't see us going into the crowded consumer space."

IBM says it recently surveyed 5,000 executives, asking them where AI could provide the greatest value. Some of the areas the execs identified were IT, information security, customer service and risk management.

"Those are clearly areas where IBM has both deep experience and street cred," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, an IT research company. "There are problems that are well beyond the current capabilities of Amazon Alexa and Google Voice so IBM has what you might call great field advantage."

The Instagram cofounders' Monday night bombshell, that they were resigning from Facebook, has all the telltale signs of a bad breakup.

But to people inside the organization, the divorce was a long time coming, even if the announcement came without warning.

The photo-sharing app was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and has flourished under the wings of Facebook. With more than 1 billion users and a fast-growing ad business, Instagram is considered by many to be Facebook's smartest acquisition and among the best deals in tech industry history.

The success masked many of the tensions between Instagram and its parent company. The two cultures are very different, with separate traditions and priorities.

To Instagrammers, Facebook is the soul-less corporate giant that happens to own them. To many Facebook employees, Instagram people are arrogant, "too cool for school," and not team players.

After years of finding common ground and resolving differences, the leadership of the two companies appears to have reached a breaking point this week. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the two founders of Instagram, announced their plans to leave in a freighted farewell note.

Exactly what triggered the breaking point remains unclear, but according to several sources that Business Insider spoke to, there's been a long buildup of friction between the two organizations.

Kevin likes getting things perfect, Facebook prefers iteration

Instagram and Facebook's teams work very differently. Instagram has an extremely heavy focus on design, with significant thought going into new products before launch, with the intent to perfect them before unveiling them to the world.

Facebook, in contrast, has a more iterative and data-driven approach, looking at what users are already doing, and frequently making minor changes to the product. "Kevin focuses a lot on visual feel and getting things perfect, while Facebook prefers iteration," a source said.

Instagram's design-heavy focus stems from the top down — Systrom is into fashion, while Krieger collects art. When Instagram was rushing to get its Stories product out the door in the summer of 2016, Krieger personally jumped in and built the neon effects pen that gives the feature some of its distinctive flair, another source recalled.

With the duo out of the picture, sources predicted ever-closer integration between the two groups, with Instagram morphing from a semi-autonomous organization into a product unit within the Facebook organization.

Although Systrom and Krieger were always careful to be diplomatic in public comments about the relationship with Facebook, the growing pressure from Facebook to integrate the two platforms was a longstanding source of tension that required them to push back at times and to acquiesce at others.

The Justin Bieber stress test

One such area was advertising: Early in Instagram's history, its focus when it came to ads was high-quality, glossy ads: At one point, Systrom was approving every single one himself. But the model could not scale, and Facebook pushed the company into integrating more closely with its own advertising business. Instagram employees were worried at the time, but it ultimately resulted it a sustained growth in revenues and profits for the app.

Another early example was the launch of Instagram's web profiles back in November 2012, shortly after Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. Systrom was worried that it doing so could lead to spam on the platform, but Facebook pushed for it because of its potential for businesses and to grow the userbase.

At the same time, Instagram has benefitted immeasurably from Facebook's guidance and technical expertise. Prior to the acquisition, the social network would buckle under the weight of Justin Bieber, its servers crashing as they struggled to handle his millions of fans. It remains an open question whether Instagram could have succeeded the same way — recently hitting the one-billion-user mark — without Facebook's help.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Facebook and Instagram have clashed recently

There have been significant more recent clashes leading up to Systrom and Krieger's exits. Employees at Instagram felt they were losing autonomy, as the two products became more closely integrated over the last year.

One recent flashpoint: Users can share photos from Instagram to Facebook, and historically this included an attribution line leading back to Instagram. But this was removed, to the frustration of Instagram. (Recode also previously reported that this was a point of contention.)

"Kevin [Systrom] has been super-pissed-off" at Mark [Zuckerberg]," an anonymous 'high-level" source told NBC News.

Interestingly, last week there was also a report from The Verge alleging that Instagram was considering a feature that would let users re-share friends' photos onto their own feed. Facebook initially declined to comment on the report, and only later denied it was true. (The Verge stands by its reporting.) It's not clear what the truth of the matter is, or if it played any part in Krieger and Systrom's ultimate exit.

One source said they expected Systrom's recent paternity leave following the birth of his first child to have played a part in his decision to go.

The departure of both cofounders simultaneously — with no staggered transition period between them — has alarmed some observers, but a source didn't think it was surprising that they jumped ship together: "They have a really, really strong cofounder relationship. That's always ... been the case."

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After a Hawaiian telescope spotted 'Oumuamua traveling through space in October 2017, astronomers realized it was weird.

Very weird.

The object had a cigar-like shape and was 750 feet by 115 feet in size, or roughly as large as a skyscraper. It was dark red in color and moving inexplicably fast. Just in case, one group of astronomers even scanned it for alien radio emissions (yet heard nothing).

Most importantly, 'Oumuamua wasn't circling the sun like a typical space rock. Instead, it had dived between Mercury and the sun, swooped below our home star, and was zooming past Earth on its way out of our solar system.

This showed that 'Oumuamua — whose name means "a messenger from afar, arriving first" in Hawaiian — was actually an interstellar traveler from beyond the solar system.

The path of the object 'Oumuamua through the solar system in September and October 2017.nagualdesign and Tomruen/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Astronomers eventually determined 'Oumuamua wasn't an asteroid but instead a "mildly active" comet.

But if it is not from our solar system, then where did it come from?

Using the newest and most precise star map ever created, eight astronomers have located four stars that are candidates for 'Oumuamua's home. Each star's path in relatively recent cosmological history matches somewhat closely to the comet's historic path.

Their study, highlighted Tuesday in a European Space Agency (ESA) press release, was recently accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, a peer-reviewed science publication.

How the team found candidate homes for 'Oumuamua

An illustration of the Gaia spacecraft.ESA

The research team began its search with an unprecedented map of 1.7 billion stars created by an ESA spacecraft called Gaia. The new map, released in April, is the second Gaia dataset published by the ESA since the spacecraft launched in December 2013.

The map doesn't just note the position of the stars, though: It also shows where stars are moving through space and how fast.

About 7 million stars in Gaia's database have motion data that is detailed enough to let astronomers to precisely "rewind" their positions to millions of years in the past.

By comparing the historic path of 'Oumuamua against these millions of stars, the team discovered four candidates which line up within a few light-years of the comet. One of these star systems may have ejected 'Oumuamua toward Earth, likely via a giant planet early in the system's formation.

All of the candidates are dwarf stars, which means they are small and burn very hot. Two were previously studied (HD 292249 and HIP 3757) and two others were temporarily named "home-3" and "home-4" by the tem.

The closest match to the path of 'Oumuamua was with the dwarf star HIP 3757. The paths of the star and wayward comet came within two light-years of each other some 1 million years or so ago.

Why the search is not over

Gaia's all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. ESA/Gaia/DPAC

The team still isn't confident they've found 'Oumuamua's home.

For one, Gaia's latest and most detailed sample of 7 million stars — while vast — is only partial. Some 180 million stars exist closer to Earth than the ones examined by the research team.

"Hence it is [therefore] unlikely that we would find the home system in our study," the authors wrote in their study.

The team also looked for encounters within the past few million years. In reality, 'Oumuamua may have traveled much farther and longer before reaching our solar system — perhaps tens of millions of years or more, the authors said.

In addition, the four stars pinpointed by the search aren't yet known to harbor any planets, let alone worlds large enough to kick 'Oumuamua out of its home star system.

Finally, the speed of 'Oumuamua is better explained by a two-star (or binary) system, yet none of the four systems described by the study have more than one star in them.

The astronomers behind the work are waiting for Gaia's third star map to be released. Those data should describe the ultra-precise motions of 10 times as many nearby stars as the team looked at for their study — perhaps including the one from which our interstellar visitor originated.

"The search for 'Oumuamua's home continues," the authors said.

On Monday, Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger made the unexpected announcement that they would be leaving the company in the the coming weeks.

They didn't provide a reason for quitting, but in the last interviews he gave before announcing his departure, Systrom may have hinted at why he and Krieger decided to leave the company.

Systrom recently made an appearance on the Masters of Scale podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, where he discussed his visions for Instagram and how the company came to be. In the interview, Systrom spoke about his decision to sell Instagram to Facebook, and how he was initially optimistic about the relationship.

"The decision to sell was mostly about whether or not we were aligned in our vision of Instagram, and I think Mark and I both saw at the time that Instagram was a special thing," Systrom said in the interview. "It wasn't going to be like, 'Oh, we'll buy this thing and it'll just be Facebook Photos.' Like, 'We'll rebrand it as Facebook Photos.' It's a unique community and had a unique angle and he wanted to invest in it."

Systrom also explained how Facebook's infrastructure had a huge effect on Instagram's growth, and the relationship between the two companies was mutually beneficial. However, according to Recode, this relationship began to decay as Facebook began to take Instagram in a different direction — a direction that was antithetical to Systrom's vision of keeping Instagram "simple" and distinct from Facebook.

"The whole idea of joining Facebook was that we could scale way more quickly than we would independently," Systrom said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, which was conducted before his departure announcement. While the ability to quickly scale the Instagram platform was an upside to selling to Facebook, Systrom may have come to disagree with how the parent company was treating that relationship.

However, it's been rumored that the duo's departure came as a result of some headbutting with Facebook executives over their conflicting visions of what Instagram should be, and whether the social media app was competing with Facebook's userbase. Multiple sources told Recode that Systrom and Krieger were frustrated with how Facebook had been dealing with Instagram lately, after an initially smooth and co-beneficial relationship for the first six years.

In the last year or so, Facebook lessened its promotion of Instagram, according to Recode, removing the Instagram label when pictures from the platform were shared to Facebook and decreasing the amount of Instagram promotion from within Facebook, in addition to testing Instagram notifications that would send people to Facebook. Recode is also reporting that there was conflict over the introduction of Instagram TV, and that Facebook was worried it would draw users away from Facebook's own in-app video service. Given the sum of these actions, Recode's sources claim Instagram executives were worried Facebook may have been intentionally slowing Instagram's growth.

For now, Systrom isn't setting the record straight one way or the other, but that could change once the executive officially departs the company in coming weeks — or perhaps the next time he sits down with a reporter to talk about whatever new project he's working on next.

You can listen to or read Systrom's interview with Hoffman on the Masters of Scale podcast here. You can read the full Wall Street Journal article here.

On Thursday of last week, Social Capital co-founder and early Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya published a Medium post outlining his firm's new ambitions. No longer would Social Capital operate as traditional venture firm, Palihapitiya wrote; instead, it would act as a "technology holding company" that would invest off of a "a multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital."

While Palihapitiya has portrayed Social Capital's recent aspirations as what he describes as a "return to the firm's founding principles," some insiders say that Palihapitiya's change of heart might have more to do with the firm's troubles raising outside capital than anything else.

"It didn't come out of the blue," one person said. "The issue is he can't fundraise."

Exactly what led to the change has become one of the most buzzed about topics inside Silicon Valley's startup and investing circles. The abrupt change, at a firm that had emerged as one of the industry's most celebrated new players, has left many scratching their heads and wondering whether it reflects the iconoclastic streak of a visionary tech executive or the storyline of a familiar fall from grace.

A former Facebook executive, Palihapitiya has raised billions of dollars from investors eager to benefit from his insight and his connections. And to hear Palihapitiya tell it, he recently decided that dealing with outside investors was a hassle he didn't need.

"By the summer of 2018," writes Palihapitiya, "we had finished a detailed examination of the many ways we could expand...  it wasn't about raising more money from outsiders..."

But according to people familiar with the matter, in the summer of 2018, Palihapitiya was still very much interested in and actively discussing raising money from outsiders.

At at an all-hands meeting in late July, Palihapitiya announced Social Capital's intentions to begin fundraising for Fund IV in September 2018, a person told Business Insider. Palihapitiya had been absent from the office for many months, but he turned heads by arriving at the office that day chauffeured in a Bentley and bearing the news. The firm should get its pitch deck in order, he is said to have announced.

But new fundraising efforts had been delayed again and again, sources say, making many insiders unsure of Palihapitiya's latest directive. Often, Palihapitiya would say that a fund was close to being closed, or that a new fund was in the process of being raised, but nothing would ever come of it, multiple people said.

While Palihapitiya was something of a golden child in Silicon Valley when he launched Social Capital, raising money from big name investors and star-studded tech executives, his star had recently begun to fade. There were signs that some investors, including some of the firm's heavyweight limited partners, were unhappy, multiple people said. It was well known that many limited partners had declined to reinvest when Social Capital raised its third fund in 2015, another person said.

Multiple people said that many of the firm's recent voluntary departures were the result of the on-again-off-again attempts to fundraise. Those departures created a vicious cycle, by spooking some investors. Some limited partners had even begun asking to have their stakes paid out in recent months.

Palihapitiya himself has said that he doesn't have much interest in his investors' input. In an interview with The Information last week, Palihapitiya said that he doesn't review investor feedback. "Who cares?" he told The Information when asked his thoughts on his investors' insight."It doesn't matter."

A spokeswoman for Social Capital declined to comment.

Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Google Chrome, indicated on Tuesday that the company is ready to make changes involving a controversial new Chrome feature that some security researchers have called a threat to privacy.

In an Twitter post, Tabriz, who calls herself the "browser boss," said: "We've heard — and appreciate — your feedback from the last few days, and we'll be making some product changes."

Tabriz offered no specifics about the changes.

On Sunday, Matthew Green, a cryptography and security researcher as well as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, on Sunday helped bring to light that Google had quietly begun logging users into the Chrome browser without their knowledge or consent.

In a blog post titled, "Why I'm done with Chrome," Green wrote Google tucked the login change into the latest Chrome update. The way it works is that anytime someone logs into one of Google's properties, such as YouTube or Gmail, they will automatically get signed into Chrome.

For years, Google has given users of Chrome, the world's most popular browser, the option of surfing the web without logging in. What's important about that is that users had to login first and then consent to the sync feature before their private browser history was shared with Google.

Because Google was logging in people involuntarily, and because of changes to the sync-consent page, it had become much easier for users to accidentally agree to share their browser histories, Green said.

Tabriz said Google made the login change to "clarify when you're signed in/out of the browser as well as Google websites."

Green was skeptical and said Google's reasoning made no sense.

Green's blog stirred debate among Chrome fans, with many not seeing the change as a problem. Still, dozens of others criticized Google via the social networks. On Tuesday, some Chrome users were exchanging instructions on Twitter on how to disable the auto-login feature.

One of the main questions of the critics: Why would Google's managers make this change without notifying users? Answers are not immediately forthcoming.

Ng Han Guan/AP

Nio, widely seen as the Tesla of China, is tumbling this week, which echoes an investor's bearish view.

"Nio's not a stock we have any interest in," said Mark Tepper, president and CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners, managing over $1 billion in assets. "An unproven management team along zero experience in manufacturing cars makes this an easy stock to steer clear of."

Nio has gained 21% since the company's initial public offering on September 12. Shares priced at $6.26 apiece, the low end of its range, causing the electric-car maker to fall short of raising the $1.8 billion it had sought. But one day after its lackluster debut, the stock soared 75%, sending its market capitalization above $12 billion — despite Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu assigning an "underperform" rating and saying he thinks a capital raise is coming in the next 12 to 18 months.

Now with the shares sliding from their post-IPO high, Nio's market cap has dropped below $8 billion. But the company is still overvalued based on its sales, according to Tepper. "With $7 million of sales and an $8 billion market cap, we can’t justify owning it," he said. 

The Tencent-backed electric-car startup delivered its first volume-manufactured vehicle — the ES8 — to users on June 28, and started to generate revenue this year, according to its IPO filing. Nio said it generated revenue of $6.95 million in the first half of 2018, and that it had 6,201 unfilled ES8 reservations by the end of August, for which non-refundable deposits had been made but customers could still cancel their orders.

And for Nio, scaling production may take some time. Tesla has suffered through production problems nearly every time it rolled out a new model. 

In July 2017, CEO Elon Musk warned Tesla would face manufacturing challenges for "at least six months of production hell" as it ramped up Model 3 production to 500,000 per year. The electric-car maker endured even larger production hell with its previous three vehicles, the original Roadster, the Model S sedan, and the Model X SUV, Musk told Business Insider.

"Look at Tesla’s recent struggles," Tepper said. "That makes it even less attractive for us."

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Amazon is doubling down on the home.

The company's Alexa Fund, which it usually uses to fund voice-technology ventures, has invested in prefabricated housing startup Plant Prefab, the startup announced on Tuesday. Plant Prefab focuses on building new, prefabricated, single- and multi-family homes using sustainable practices, and it claims it can build faster and with less waste than traditional methods, according to the company's website.

Obvious Ventures also participated in the startup's $6.7 million round of funding.

Why is Amazon's Alexa Fund interested in a prefab home startup? It's just the latest move that suggests that Amazon's Alexa technology is all about the home.

"Voice has emerged as a delightful technology in the home, and there are now more than 20,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices from 3,500 different brands," Paul Bernard, director of Amazon's Alexa Fund, said in a prepared statement.

"Plant Prefab is a leader in home design and an emerging, innovative player in home manufacturing. We're thrilled to support them as they make sustainable, connected homes more accessible to customers and developers."

Bernard refers directly to connected homes, an area that could spell growth for Amazon if the company is able to integrate Alexa into a home before it is even built and delivered to customers.

Amazon is looking to own the home more completely. Earlier in September, it unveiled updates and additions to its Alexa-powered device lineup that are designed to enhance playback of music and video, as well as more easily control smart-home devices. The new devices further entrench Alexa as a leading platform for the connected home as Amazon builds out its ecosystem of entertainment and utility.

The iPhone XS is faster than the Galaxy Note 9, according to a new speed test from PhoneBuff posted on YouTube.

This speed test is non-scientific: Basically, the test consists of opening a series of apps, and whichever phone finishes first wins the test.

But we've been following PhoneBuff's tests for a while, because they do a good job of showing how quickly the phone opens up apps like the camera, Microsoft Word, and various popular games. To add additional objectivity, PhoneBuff's test is no longer done by a person, but rather a mechanical arm equipped with a stylus.

This year, Apple's fastest phone blew Samsung's flagship phone out of the water, beating it by 14 seconds.

Last year, Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 actually beat Apple's iPhone 8. But in 2016, Apple's iPhone beat Samsung's fastest Note.

The latest version of iPhone software, iOS 12, placed an emphasis on speed and stability, with several users observing that it seemed like Apple cut back on how long operating system animations took to complete.

"It seems like Apple's claim that the A12 Bionic chip can load apps up to 30% faster holds true," PhoneBuff host David Rahimi said. "But at the same time, at least some of the difference can be attributed to the optimizations in iOS 12."

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