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US President Donald Trump hosted a high-powered group of tech executives at the White House on Thursday as he showcased research on artificial intelligence and boasted of investments that companies are making around the United States. This is taking our country to a new level, he said at the centre of a long table surrounded by what he described as high IQ people". It was the latest example of a delicate two-way courtship between Trump and tech leaders, several of whom attended his inauguration. Trump has exulted in the attention from some of the world's most successful businesspeople, while the companies are eager to remain on the good side of the mercurial president. While the executives praised Trump and talked about their hopes for technological advancement, the Republican president was focused on dollar signs. He went around the table and asked executives how much they were investing in the country. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who sat to Trump's right, said USD 600 billion. Apple
Even as he grows older, Microsoft founder Bill Gates still fondly remembers the catalytic computer code he wrote 50 years ago that opened up a new frontier in technology. Although the code that Gates printed out on a teletype machine may look crude compared to what's powering today's artificial intelligence platforms, it played a critical role in creating Microsoft in April 1975 a golden anniversary that the Redmond, Washington, company will celebrate on Friday. Gates, 69, set the stage for that jubilee with a blog post reminiscing on how he and his old high school friend the late Paul Allen scrambled to create the world's first software factory after reading an article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine about the Altair 8800, a minicomputer that would be powered by a tiny chip made by the then-obscure technology company, Intel. The article inspired Gates, who was just a freshman at Harvard University, and Allen to call Altair's maker, Micro Instrumentation