This morning, some of the most powerful and intelligent companies in the world—Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft—announced a watershed partnership to oversee the development of Artificial Intelligence technology.

Metadata has become the Holy Grail for technology companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google.  By tracking our every click, purchase, query, and preference, they have collected invaluable market intelligence and priceless knowledge about consumer preferences, psychographics, and purchasing patterns.   With this metadata, these large technology companies can not only predict where the market is heading, but, like Apple with the iPhone, how to create new markets that never before existed.