Pete Warden has been trying to teach computers to see since the 1990s. Now, thanks to the branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, he's finally making some progress. Deep learning attempts to model the structure and behavior of the human brain to solve complex computer science problems. The field has been around since the 1980s, but there's been an explosion of interest in its techniques in the past few years as the cost of powerful computers has fallen. Google now uses deep learning inside several of its online services, and last year, it hired Geoffrey Hinton, the central figure in the movement.

Andrew Ng is the man who helped launch Google's wildly ambitious effort to recreate the human brain with computer hardware and software. And now, he will oversee a similar project at Baidu, often called "the Google of China." Last year, in Cupertino, California, not far from Apple headquarters, Baidu quietly opened a research outpost dedicated to "deep learning"–a subfield of artificial intelligence that seeks to vastly improve computing tasks by mimicking the way the human brain operates–and in the months since, this operation has expanded in significant ways. Today, the Chinese search giant will announce that the lab has graduated to a much larger space in Sunnyvale and that Ng, a Stanford University professor, will oversee a new Baidu artificial intelligence research group that spans this lab and an operation in China. "Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning, and deep learning in particular," says Bruno Olshausen, the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro displayed one of his androids on Sunday at the SXSW Interactive Festival. The android, which is modeled after Ishiguro, held an autonomous conversation in Japanese on stage with an Ishiguro associate. Professional South Korean Go players review a match after another bout lost to a computer in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match. AUSTIN – Science and technology have always cut with double-edged swords, capable of both propelling humanity to new achievements while threatening us with potential catastrophe. That chilling theme was explored by two leading technologists at SXSW Interactive, a festival that has seen its share of humans rising up against the machines.

Black-and-white pieces occupy spaces on a board during a game of Go, which Google's software engineers say they've taught a computer program to play better than most humans. Google's software engineers have taught a computer program to beat almost any human at an ancient and highly complex Chinese strategy game known as "Go." While computers have largely mastered checkers and chess, Go, considered the oldest board game still played, is far more complicated. There are more possible positions in the game than are atoms in the universe, Google said -- an "irresistible" challenge for the company's DeepMind engineers, who used artificial intelligence to enable the program to learn from repeat games. The Google unit's AlphaGo computer program is much more sophisticated than the IBM-created Deep Blue computer that in 1996 won the first chess game against a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov.

In this handout image provided by Google, South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match with other professional Go players after the fourth match against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on March 13, 2016 in Seoul. Lee Sedol and DeepMind brought vastly different brains to their five-game Go match at a Seoul hotel this past week -- one made of flesh and blood and the other of bits and metal. Yet the South Korean and the artificial intelligence machine from Google's U.K. unit earned their respective victories in a Four Seasons meeting room thanks in part to a common tactic: Surprise. In doing so, both played an ancient Asian game according to an ancient Asian maxim. "The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy," Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War.

In this handout image provided by Google, South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol puts his first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the third Google DeepMind Challenge Match on March 12, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM's Watson computer now has company at beating humans in very complicated games. Google's artificial intelligence machine, called DeepMind, this week defeated a human champion three straight times at the ancient board game of Go. The feat has been viewed widely as a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence, one that intensifies the high-stakes race among tech giants to develop ever-smarter machines. "DeepMind is doing what appears to be thinking -- that's what has everybody jazzed," says Jonathan Crane, chief commercial officer of IPsoft, a startup that makes an AI-based customer-service product.

In an effort to accelerate its "machine learning," Twitter announced Wednesday that it acquired Whetlab, a Cambridge-based start-up with a focus on artificial intelligence. Details on the acquisition were not immediately available, but Whetlab said on its website that Twitter will now have access to the start-up's technology and small team as part of the deal. Whetlab is a start-up that develops artificial intelligence technologies, which can be used for things such as object recognition, speech processing and computational biology, according to the company's website. With its innovative technology, Whetlab said, it aims to make "machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically." "Rather than having to hire doctorate-wielding machine learning experts to architect and tune your system, our patent-pending technology helps your engineers -- your team that already understands your data and your needs -- get the latest and greatest deep learning techniques going in days rather than months of years," Whetlab said on its website.

What next for Google's DeepMind, now that the company has mastered the ancient board game of Go, beating the Korean champion Lee Se-Dol 4–1 this month? A paper from two UCL researchers suggests one future project: playing poker. And unlike Go, victory in that field could probably fund itself – at least until humans stopped playing against the robot. The paper's authors are Johannes Heinrich, a research student at UCL, and David Silver, a UCL lecturer who is working at DeepMind. Silver, who was AlphaGo's main programmer, has been called the "unsung hero at Google DeepMind", although this paper relates to his work at UCL.

Google DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, is developing a software in partnership with NHS hospitals to alert staff to patients at risk of deterioration and death through kidney failure. The technology, which is run through a smartphone app, has the support of Lord Darzi, the surgeon and former health minister in the Blair government who is director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. "Innovation is the only solution we have for a sustainable NHS, both economically and in meeting the challenges and demands upon it," Darzi told the Guardian in a preview of the technology. Darzi has led a team working on a smartphone app called Hark for the last five years, which DeepMind has now acquired and will develop. Hark identifies the tasks that need to be performed to prevent a patient who has been admitted to hospital deteriorating, allocates them to the right staff, and tracks what has been done – or not done.

Demis Hassabis has a modest demeanour and an unassuming countenance, but he is deadly serious when he tells me he is on a mission to "solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". Coming from almost anyone else, the statement would be laughable; from him, not so much. Hassabis is the 39-year-old former chess master and video-games designer whose artificial intelligence research start-up, DeepMind, was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported $625 million. He is the son of immigrants, attended a state comprehensive in Finchley and holds degrees from Cambridge and UCL in computer science and cognitive neuroscience. A "visionary" manager, according to those who work with him, Hassabis also reckons he has found a way to "make science research efficient" and says he is leading an "Apollo programme for the 21st century". He's the sort of normal-looking bloke you wouldn't look twice at on the street, but Tim Berners-Lee once described him to me as one of the smartest human beings on the planet. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, of course, every time we interrogate Siri or get a recommendation on Android. And in the short term, Google products will surely benefit from Hassabis's research, even if improvements in personalisation, search, YouTube, and speech and facial recognition are not presented as "AI" as such. "It's just stuff that works.") In the longer term, though, the technology he is developing is about more than emotional robots and smarter phones.