That's how much virtual computing time it took researchers at OpenAI, the non-profit artificial intelligence lab funded by Elon Musk and others, to train its disembodied hand. The team paid Google $3,500 to run its software on thousands of computers simultaneously, crunching the actual time to 48 hours. After training the robot in a virtual environment, the team put it to a test in the real world.

Gripping something with your hand is one of the first things you learn to do as an infant, but it's far from a simple task, and only gets more complex and variable as you grow up. This complexity makes it difficult for machines to teach themselves to do, but researchers at Elon Musk and Sam Altman-backed OpenAI have created a system that not only holds and manipulates objects much like a human does, but developed these behaviors all on its own. Many robots and robotic hands are already proficient at certain grips or movements -- a robot in a factory can wield a bolt gun even more dexterously than a person. But the software that lets that robot do that task so well is likely to be hand-written and extremely specific to the application. You couldn't for example, give it a pencil and ask it to write.

Vid Human hands are surprisingly dexterous: they can knit clothes, stuff delivery packages with things, play the piano, and so on, albeit with practice. Yet if you're worried machines are going to take these pleasures away from us, be assured us mortals can, for now, pick up these skills faster than robots can, judging from the following findings. Researchers at OpenAI trained, using about a hundred years of simulated experience, a robotic system called Dactyl to rotate and orientate a cube. Dactyl exists not just in its virtual world, though. It can also control a Shadow Dexterous Hand: a metal meathook complete with five fingers, force sensors, and 24 degrees of freedom – pretty close to a human's 27 degrees of freedom. The cube it's told to fondle features a specific letter and color on each of its six faces, and it has to figure out how to manipulate the object so that it finds the requested symbol.

It's still early days in creating the kind of human-like androids we see in the movies, but new research brings us ever closer to the idea. Boston Dynamics has become the de facto image of locomotion for both humans and their pets, while LG already has its CLOi porter'bots and DARPA is working on centaur-like designs for disaster relief. Now, researchers at the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI are working on making robot hands more dextrous. According to a blog post, the team has trained a human-like robot hand called the Shadow Dextrous Hand to manipulate real-world objects like a child's block. It uses the same algorithms and code from its OpenAI Five project, which has been training DOTA 2 bots to play video games.

Elon Musk is kinda worried about AI. ("AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don't think people fully appreciate that," as he put it in 2017.) So he helped found a research nonprofit, OpenAI, to help cut a path to "safe" artificial general intelligence, as opposed to machines that pop our civilization like a pimple. Yes, Musk's very public fears may distract from other more real problems in AI. But OpenAI just took a big step toward robots that better integrate into our world by not, well, breaking everything they pick up. OpenAI researchers have built a system in which a simulated robotic hand learns to manipulate a block through trial and error, then seamlessly transfers that knowledge to a robotic hand in the real world.

Google is an advertising company. In spite of its dominance in mobile operating systems, productivity tools like Gmail, and forays into media with subscription services such as Google Play Music and YouTube TV, the company still makes nearly 90% of its money from advertisements and its advertising platform. Advertising is also the primary driver of revenue for its holding company, Alphabet, which has a large portfolio of other businesses including AI research lab DeepMind, autonomous driving company Waymo, life sciences company Verily, and investment groups GV and CapitalG. Many of those other companies are long-term bets that aren't expected to pay off in the near term--or maybe ever. There are grandiose objectives like DeepMind's quest to "solve intelligence," or Calico's mission to cure death.

We've created an AI system, OpenAI Five, which has started to defeat amateur human teams. This video contains an overview of our system, some example gameplay, and professional caster Blitz's analysis of our bot, as we start to gear up for playing a professional team at this year's Dota world championships, The International. See our blog post for more details: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five.

Cambridge University is launching a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning, thanks to a benefaction from the world-leading British AI company – Google's DeepMind – whose IP was born within the globally acclaimed seat of learning. The new chair, to be based at Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology, will build on the university's strengths in computer science and engineering and will be a focal point for the wide range of AI-related research taking place across the university. Cambridge researchers are designing systems that are cybersecure, model human reasoning, interact in affective ways with us, uniquely identify us by our face and give insights into our biological makeup. The first DeepMind chair is expected to take up their position in October 2019, following an international search by the department. The chair will have full academic freedom to pursue research in the field of machine learning.

Cyclists and pedestrians move along Trinity Street past St Johns College, part of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, U.K., on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2014. As the U.K. government cuts funding for universities, Cambridge's colleges are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial about making money. DeepMind, a Google-owned lab that is at the front of the AI race, is gifting the University of Cambridge an undisclosed sum to appoint a "DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning". The donation comes after DeepMind and other tech companies have been criticised for poaching dozens of leading academics from top universities like Cambridge, luring them with big salaries that universities can't compete with. Here's a report about some of DeepMind's previous Oxbridge hires.

Tech leaders, including Elon Musk and the three co-founders of Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind, have signed a pledge promising to not develop "lethal autonomous weapons." It's the latest move from an unofficial and global coalition of researchers and executives that's opposed to the propagation of such technology. The pledge warns that weapon systems that use AI to "[select] and [engage] targets without human intervention" pose moral and pragmatic threats. Morally, the signatories argue, the decision to take a human life "should never be delegated to a machine." On the pragmatic front, they say that the spread of such weaponry would be "dangerously destabilizing for every country and individual."