A new artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Stanford physicists accomplished the same feat in just a few hours.

Called Atom2Vec, the program successfully learned to distinguish between different atoms after analyzing a list of chemical compound names from an online database. The unsupervised AI then used concepts borrowed from the field of natural language processing – in particular, the idea that the properties of words can be understood by looking at other words surrounding them – to cluster the elements according to their chemical properties.

With more businesses using artificial intelligence for various applications and to engage with consumers, the industry is working to make those interactions more human-like, said Zhu "Drew" Zhang, associate professor of information systems and Kingland Faculty Fellow in Business Analytics in Iowa State University's Ivy College of Business. Zhang is contributing to that effort by improving how machines, such as smartphones and computers, understand and generate language.

Tesla’s gonzo co-founder went on a podcast, said he’s probably a few months away from announcing a human-computer interface called the Neuralink, and then he got high.

That only barely scratches the surface of all the Elon Musk headlines from this week, let alone some of the news-making items that came out of his appearance Thursday on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Elon, who’s famously been on the “I’m absolutely terrified” end of the artificial intelligence discussion, said he’ll be announcing “in a few months” a mechanism by which people can effectively merge themselves with computers. It’s a kind of dystopian symbiosis that really just takes what’s already a reality now, the fact that we’re so tied to and connected with our phones, and elevates that to the next level.