A year on from its victory over Go star Lee Sedol, Google DeepMind is preparing a "festival" of exhibition matches for its board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, to see how far it has evolved in the last 12 months. Headlining the event will be a one-on-one match against the current number one player of the ancient Asian game, 19-year-old Chinese professional Ke Jie. DeepMind has had its eye on this match since even before AlphaGo beat Lee. On the eve of his trip to Seoul in March 2016, the company's co-founder, Demis Hassabis, told the Guardian: "There's a young kid in China who's very, very strong, who might want to play us." As well as the one-on-one match with Jie, which will be played over the course of three games, AlphaGo will take part in two other games with slightly odder formats. One, "Pair Go", will see two human Go professionals play against each other, each partnered up with their own iteration of AlphaGo.

In the Baidu project, a virtual teacher gave positive or negative feedback to an agent who was responding to commands issued by the teacher. If the agent rightly connected the command with the intended action, it received a reward, and in the case of failure, it was penalized. The agent slowly learned the correct meaning and usage of words. Later, when presented with an unfamiliar command, it was able to extrapolate the correct meaning and fulfill the desired goal, an example of one shot learning. While this whole process took place in a simple 2D maze world, it could likely be extrapolated to vivid 3D environments, and from there to real world settings.

You might think, based on the type of research they're doing, that the OpenAI office would be full of gadgets, full of wonder, full of weird experiments. There are no Faraday cages. Well, okay, there is a robot. And it's tucked away in a side room. It's surrounded by cobbled-together protective material so that it doesn't smash into itself if it starts flailing about due to a programming error.

Baidu has been something of a dark horse where AI breakthroughs are concerned; the company's pronouncements always seeming to fall short of the shockwaves sent out by DeepMind, Facebook, and IBM. Nevertheless, this recent achievement could have some important consequences. It helps to differentiate the Baidu AI language use from anything you've encountered with Siri or Google Assistant. In the Baidu project, a virtual teacher gave positive or negative feedback to an agent who was responding to commands issued by the teacher. If the agent rightly connected the command with the intended action, it received a reward, and in the case of failure, it was penalized.

Head and neck scans are one of the areas where Google's DeepMind will be finetuning its health skills. Healthcare has always been seen as rich pickings for artificial intelligence: when IBM first decided to kit out Watson for use in the enterprise, its earliest commercial test was in cancer care. There are a number of reasons why health and artificial intelligence might seem like a good fit. One is simply that healthcare organisations around the world, and in the UK in particular, need to save money: any task that can be taken off a clinician's workload and automated by AI potentially represents a cost saving. AI that knows you're sick before you do: IBM's five-year plan to remake healthcare A mix of artificial intelligence and custom silicon could help people diagnose themselves with a range of conditions before they show symptoms.

Last year, Alphabet's DeepMind division captured the world's attention by besting humanity's top player in the game of Go. The achievement, which many experts predicted was still a decade off, showed the rapid progress being made in the world of artificial intelligence. DeepMind subsequently announced that its next goal in gaming was mastering StarCraft, a classic PC game that is a staple of competitive e-sports. Facebook also threw its hat in the ring, creating an open-source framework so that developers could work on solving StarCraft using the social network's AI toolkit. Now a team from China's Alibaba has published a paper describing a system that learned to execute a number of strategies employed by high-level players without being given any specific instruction on how best to manage combat.

Google's DeepMind has been playing video games on the Atari since 2014, and it got pretty good too, beating human scores. The problem was, it couldn't remember how it did it. So, every time a new Atari game was introduced, a new neural network was created, but in doing this, the AI could never benefit from its own learned experiences. However, a group of researchers from DeepMind in collaboration with those at Imperial College London has been busy creating an algorithm that could change all that. The new algorithm allows the AI to learn, retain, and then reuse the knowledge that it learns.

In 2013 a British artificial-intelligence startup called DeepMind surprised computer scientists by showing off software that could learn to play classic Atari games better than an expert human player. DeepMind was soon acquired by Google, and the technique that beat the Atari games, reinforcement learning, has become a hot topic in the field of AI and robotics. Google used reinforcement learning to create software that beat a champion Go player last year. Now OpenAI, a nonprofit research institute cofounded and funded by Elon Musk, says it has discovered that an easier-to-use alternative to reinforcement learning can get rival results when it plays games and performs other tasks. At MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Monday, OpenAI's research director, Ilya Sutskever, said that could allow researchers to make progress in machine learning faster.

One thing you won't hear him championing is the unfettered rise of artificial intelligence, which he once described as the "biggest existential threat" to humankind. Musk's prejudice prompted him to donate millions to the ethics think tank OpenAI--and it's why he's urging other billionaire techies like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet's Larry Page to proceed with caution on their myriad of machine learning and robotics experiments. OpenAI is both an ethics and a research institution. Its mandate (plucked from its website): "Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest."

Feel free to forward this email or share it with your network. How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself. Zuckerberg's dead-eyed delivery during a two-minute humblebrag about his artificial intelligence tool Jarvis makes you question who the real robot is. DEEPMIND HAS SURPASSED the human mind on the Go board. Watson has crushed America's trivia gods on Jeopardy.