A team of researchers in the UK have taught an autonomous car to stay in its own damn lane in just 20 minutes -- an impressive feat considering I know a few human drivers that couldn't achieve that in their lifetime. Road rage aside, the team at Wayve, a company founded by researchers from Cambridge University's Engineering Department detailed their "reinforcement learning" algorithm in a blog post on June 28. The algorithm, in tandem with a human safety driver, taught the car how to remain within a lane over a period of "15-20 minutes." Reinforcement learning for AI has been shown to be highly effective before, with DeepMind Technologies showing it can learn how to play games such as Go or Chess and OpenAI showing that its AI plays 180 days worth of Dota 2 every single day. While defeating human players in incredible complex games like Go or Dota 2 is certainly impressive, teaching a car to drive itself is another wheelhouse altogether.

Later this month, the best Dota 2 teams in the world will meet in Vancouver for the biggest tournament of the year, The International. The annual contest consistently boasts the highest prize pool in eSports (it's up to $23.5 million already this year), not to mention the glory that comes with winning the prestigious event. It may not be long, however, before a team of non-human players becomes worthy of such success. This weekend, the all-bot roster of OpenAI Five took on a team of Dota 2 casters and ex-pro players that individually rank amongst some of the best in the world. OpenAI Five won the best-of-three exhibition match convincingly, and the only reason the human team took a game was thanks to a little help from the audience.

OpenAI's machine learning bots have beaten another team of semi-professionals in Dota 2, in their second public match in the traditional five-versus-five settings. You can watch the action on Twitch – complete with commenters typing in SKYNET! The human team – made up of popular Twitch streamers and former professionals ranked in the 99.95th percentile – hunkered down to play against the bots known as OpenAI Five in San Francisco on Sunday. OpenAI Five smashed its opponents, winning comfortably in two out of three games. It did lose one game, however, after spectators watching the match live and on Twitch were allowed to pick the pool of heroes – the playable characters in the game.

Whether you are in Kafka's camp and think first impressions are unreliable or are a true romantic and believe in love at first sight, there's no doubt that we all make snap judgements about people every day. With studies quoting "time to judgement" from anywhere between 1/10 of a second to a minute, it seems like we all better get our acts together- and fast. After all, you never get a second chance to make a first-impression, right? Here's a bit of scientific reasoning behind our propensity to be super-judgy. Our brain's processes are often categorized into System 1 or System 2 functions: System 1 handles quick mindless tasks like blinking your eyes or breathing, while- System 2 handles deep analytical processes like algebra or solving puzzles.

Whether you are in Kafka's camp and think first impressions are unreliable or are a true romantic and believe in love at first sight, there's no doubt that we all make snap judgements about people every day. With studies quoting "time to judgement" from anywhere between 1/10 of a second to a minute, it seems like we all better get our acts together- and fast. After all, you never get a second chance to make a first-impression, right? Here's a bit of scientific reasoning behind our propensity to be super-judgy. Our brain's processes are often categorized into System 1 or System 2 functions: System 1 handles quick mindless tasks like blinking your eyes or breathing, while- System 2 handles deep analytical processes like algebra or solving puzzles.

Sam Altman is the cofounder of AI research lab OpenAI, which developed the software that took on the humans at Dota 2 . Machines have scored another victory over humans in the ongoing man vs machine saga after a team of AIs working together successfully beat five semi-professional humans at the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game of Dota 2. 'Silicon beat meat' (as one spectator put it) 2-1. The team of AIs are known as OpenAI Five and they were developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab founded by Elon Musk and Y Combinator president Sam Altman. OpenAI's agents previously beat some of the top human players in 1v1 matches but this is the first time a group of agents have come together to beat a team of humans in the top 99.95 percentile at Dota 2. The team modes are harder as they require more coordination and long-term planning. Greg Brockman, OpenAI cofounder and CTO, described the day of play as an "emotional ride" on Twitter.

The potential of artificial intelligence is the subject of a new book titled "Embracing the Power of AI". In the book, five AI experts have come together to take a deep dive into topics like the state of AI today, how organizations can implement it, and why AI will continue to impact our daily lives. One extract from the book explains how AI is: Just now reaching its moment of maturity--its tipping point--largely due to recent advancements in machine learning and deep learning, fueled by the enormous amount of data humankind is producing on a daily basis. These developments have emerged as potent drivers of innovation across a number of industries and are powering the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence investments. As this new version of AI arrives, bringing with it applications that will affect the way that billions of people live and work, it's important to think beyond the technology and start a new conversation.

I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit in some strange no man's land between science and engineering, I call it "academic engineering". Machine learning sits somewhere in between. There are examples of clear scientific papers (such as e.g. the paper that introduced the backprop itself) and there are examples of clearly engineering papers where a solution to a very particular practical problem is described.

The researchers are with OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group established in 2015.

OpenAI Five, the artificial intelligence bot that previously destroyed humans in the video game Dota 2, has just undergone another "benchmark" test -- taking on semi-professional Dota 2 players ranked in the 99.95th percentile in the world. Good news for humans: We fared a little better this time. After wiping the floor in warm up games with the audience, OpenAI Five had to take on a team of humans including former Dota 2 professionals and casters Merlini, Fogged, Cap and Blitz. In a three game series, OpenAI Five started strongly, winning the first two games comprehensively. In the final game, the OpenAI team let the audience select their team of five heroes, severely handicapping our future robot overlords.