I can't decide which aspect of this story astounds me more - the fact that a consumer medical device with capabilities akin to Dr. McCoy's tricorder has been successfully prototyped, or that it was done by two brothers from Pennsylvania, one an ER doctor and the other an engineer, who beat out a Taiwanese consumer electronics giant.

Here are the top four advertising/marketing AI tech startups, as agreed on by CB Insights and Fortune magazine.

This column is jumping the gun a bit, I admit it. But in the last two weeks people have started sending me links to stories about the crazy near future that are, like, totally blowing their minds, man. First, everyone is writing about the rise of artificial intelligence. Then there are "one step beyond" stories, like Bill Gates talking about taxing robots and using the proceeds to support the people they've thrown out of work, or Elon Musk's "neural lace" startup (which has catapulted into the popular press speculation about smartphones evolving hard-wired connections to your brain).

March was a milestone month for artificial intelligence M&A. There were a cool dozen deals in March 2017, roughly double last year's monthly average. But this month's big milestone was the first deal for AI technology to top $1 billion: Intel acquired Mobileye, a maker of machine-learning-infused autonomous driving systems, for a breathtaking $15.3 billion.