General artificial intelligence, a machine that is capable of human-level expertise in multiple tasks, was the hot topic during the morning of the Rework Deep Learning Summit in London yesterday, with two of the UK's best AI companies Google DeepMind and Swifkey weighing in on the advances being made, and how far we are from a truly human AI. In his seminal piece about DeepMind for Wired magazine in June 2015, David Rowan wrote: "[DeepMind] showed that their artificial agent had learned to play 49 Atari 2600 video games when given only minimal background information. The deep Q-network had mastered everything from a martial-arts game to boxing and 3D car-racing games, often outscoring a professional (human) games tester." What this obfuscated was that the deep neural network was learning how to master each game one at a time. The same neural network couldn't, for example, flick between two different games and maintain its skill like a human would.

These changes are called "Industry 4.0" or the fourth industrial revolution. It is an industrial revolution that uses artificial intelligence and robots in such a way that manufacturing plants will become unmanned and a majority of office jobs will be made unnecessary. In March, an AI player of the board game go, developed by Google and named AlphaGo, defeated the world's leading professional go player 4 games to 1. The pro lost the first three games, and although he won the fourth, he was defeated in the fifth round. The decisive factor that led to the victory for AlphaGo was its "deep learning" capability.

Welcome back for another edition of Under the Decision Tree. As usual there were quite a number of interesting stories focused on machine learning and AI. One particularly interesting topic this week was Micorsoft and its efforts in cancer research. There are two conferences starting on Monday next week. Please send any suggestions to: Decision Tree We would love to hear from you.

Porn companies have long been early adopters of new technology; embracing videos, DVDs, internet streaming and live web chat when these mediums were in their infancy. Now, they're using facial recognition technology to create even more'personalised' experiences, but not everyone will be happy. You can now use AI to find porn stars who look like people you know. This week Megacams, a free cam site, released a new feature on it's live sex search engine called'facial recognition'. This means visitors are able to upload an image of any celebrity, or a person they know, and find a supposedly'doppelganger' performer.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

On the surface it looks like a simple public cloud infrastructure deal. But stand back from productivity app Evernote's recently announced migration of its entire infrastructure onto Google's Cloud Platform and there's a much bigger story to tell. Productivity apps are many, but Evernote's 200 million plus customers make it one of the most popular. Allowing users to store private notes on the cloud, add multimedia, and access everything from multiple devices (recently restricted to two unless you pay a fee), Evernote's back-end now contains about five billion notes. Until now, all of that was held on Evernote's own private cloud infrastructure, but from early October it's all going to be migrated to Google's Cloud Platform. Evernote's notes were already easy to integrate with Google Drive, but this goes much deeper than the mass adoption of the cloud as a place to store data.

Apple is boosting its machine learning capabilities with the acquisition of Tuplejump. The India/US-based start-up has typically operated with open source projects such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, and the Apache Kafka distributed high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging system, but it is the FiloDB project which is said to be what interested Apple the most. The company describes itself as having the goal of simplifying data management technologies in order to make them simple to use. Apple has not confirmed the acquisition but told TechCrunch: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The FiloDB open source project is designed to build and apply machine learning concepts and analytics to large amounts of complex streaming data.

US-based tech giant Apple has now acquired Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based machine-learning startup that had been helping companies stock, process and visualizes big data with its unique software. With the India/US based company, Apple has now acquired three machine-learning companies within a short window of two years so as to expand its reach into artificial intelligence technology. According to a report on Techcrunch, the Shares of Apple (AAPL) had been continuously increasing in the afternoon trading on Thursday following the companies agreement to purchase Tuplejump, citing sources. Two co-founders of the Machine Learning startup (founded in 2013), Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu are already reported to have joined Apple while the third co-founder, Deepak Alur has joined Anaplan that is a Cloud-based business planning platform for finance, operations, and sales. Apple had been particularly interested in an open source project titled "FiloDB" that Tuplejump was currently working on so as to efficiently apply the machine learning concepts along with analytics to complex data.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for decades; Alan Turing first speculated that machines could one day think like humans back in the 1950s. But it's the combination of research breakthroughs, the wider availability of big data, and advances in graphics processing unit (GPU) technology that has ignited the AI explosion taking place today. When Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system beat South Korean champion Lee Se-dol at the ancient Chinese game Go in March 2016, it marked a turning point in AI's place in the public consciousness. Given that there are more possible Go positions than there are atoms in the universe, researchers had predicted it would be years before AI could become sophisticated enough to beat a human. AlphaGo used a form of AI called "deep learning" to master Go.

Many experts believe that artificial intelligence (AI) might lead to the end of the world--just not in the way that Hollywood films would have us believe. Movie plots, for example, feature robots increasing in intelligence until they take over the human race. The reality is far less dramatic, but may cause some incredible cultural shifts nonetheless. Last year, industry leaders like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates wrote a letter to the International Joint Conference in Argentina stating that the successful adoption of AI might be one of humankind's biggest achievements--and maybe its last. They noted that AI poses unique ethical dilemmas, which--if not considered carefully--could prove more dangerous than nuclear capabilities.