As two of the world's most well-known business leaders lock horns on the topic of AI, the technology continues to evolve at a staggeringly unabated pace. Yesterday, Google's DeepMind announced it had created an AI with'imagination', making further advancements towards replicating the complex human functionalities which make us so individual. Over the years, advancements in technology have always caused concern, outcry and resistance. In 50 years' time we'll either be looking back at Musk and Zuckerberg's passive aggressive exchange of words from a post-apocalyptic world that's been savaged by robots, or one where we're reaping the many rewards that AI advancements have enabled.

Google's DeepMind is developing an AI capable of'imagination', enabling machines to see the consequences of their actions before they make them. In two new research papers, the British AI firm, which was acquired by Google in 2014, describes new developments for "imagination-based planning" to AI. Its attempt to create algorithms that simulate the distinctly human ability to construct a plan could eventually help to produce software and hardware capable of solving complex tasks more efficiently. DeepMind's previous research in this area has been incredibly successful, with its AlphaGo AI managing to beat a series of human champions at the notoriously tricky board game Go. However, AlphaGo relies on a clearly defined set of rules to provide likely outcomes, with relatively few factors to consider. "The real world is complex, rules are not so clearly defined and unpredictable problems often arise," explain the DeepMind researchers in a blog post.

Google's London-based AI outfit DeepMind has created two different types of AI that can use their'imagination' to plan ahead and perform tasks with a higher success rate than AIs without imagination. Sorry if I made you click because you wanted AIs predicted flying cars. I promise this is cool too. In a post on their site, DeepMind researchers give a short review of "a new family of approaches for imagination-based planning." The so-called Imagination-Augmented Agents, or I2As, use an internal'imagination encoder' that helps the AI decide what are and what aren't useful predictions about its environment.

There's no question that AI is redefining processes across a whole spectrum of businesses. There is, however, a question of what that means for the overall economy. Canada is now investing in AI research with the expectation that it will benefit the country in general. DeepMind, the London-based leader in artificial intelligence owned by Google's parent-company Alphabet, is now reaching across the pond to Canada. On July 5, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO, DeepMind announced "the opening of DeepMind's first ever international AI research office in Edmonton, Canada, in close collaboration with the University of Alberta."

To give you a little more context -- and paraphrasing Alex's post -- we have entered the third wave of AI startups. The wave of applied AI companies. The first wave was purely research-driven companies, with companies like Deepmind and Nnaissence standing out. Most of them never really commercialized their product and were acquihired before generating revenues . A second wave followed and consisted of companies building machine learning infrastructures.

For some AI problems, such as playing Atari or Go, the goal is easy to define - it's winning. But how do you describe the process for performing a backflip? The difficulty of accurately describing a complex behaviour is a common problem when teaching motor skills to an artificial system. In this work we explore how sophisticated behaviors can emerge from scratch from the body interacting with the environment using only simple high-level objectives, such as moving forward without falling. Specifically, we trained agents with a variety of simulated bodies to make progress across diverse terrains, which require jumping, turning and crouching.

Google's artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, has developed an AI that has managed to learn how to walk, run, jump, and climb without any prior guidance. The result is as impressive as it is goofy.

Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.

SO THE deal struck over patient data between the Royal Free Foundation NHS Trust and AI pioneer DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. That's the long-awaited verdict of the regulator charged with upholding UK data protection rules. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the trust, part of the UK's national health service, erred in four ways. It did not examine the privacy implications of the agreement closely enough. It failed to tell patients about the deal or offer an opt-out before handing over their records.