When researchers decide to train their latest and greatest artificial intelligence (AI) systems there's one big, fundamental flaw they have to deal with – AI's, by nature – and design – are amnesiacs, that is to say they have great difficulty in retaining knowledge between tasks. It's the equivalent of trying to train someone something new when they're always forgetting stuff. So as you can imagine if you're trying to teach an AI something new it can get quite frustrating, there's even a special term for it – "Catastrophic forgetting." In a new demonstration of just how close the associations between AI's and our own brains have become though Google's DeepMind engineers, the same crazy cats who recently published a breakthrough Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) architecture, who've been teaching their AI's to dream and fight with each other, and annihilate online gamers, have just created an AI that can retain its knowledge between tasks – turning raw memory into long term experiences that stay with the program, even as it moves onto other things. And they published a paper on it.

Right now it's easiest to think about an artificial intelligence algorithm as a specific tool, like a hammer. A hammer is really good at hitting things, but when you need a saw to cut something in half, it's back to the toolbox. Train an facial recognition algorithm, but don't ask it to recognize cows. Alphabet's AI research arm, DeepMind, is trying to change that idea with a new algorithm that can learn more than one skill.

Scientists from the Oxford University along with Google's DeepMind have developed an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system was trained by thousands of hours of BBC news programs, the media outlet said Friday. The system, called "Watch, Attend and Spell," can correctly lip-read 50 percent of silent speech correctly, while professional…

Scientists from the Oxford University along with Google's DeepMind have developed an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system was trained by thousands of hours of BBC news programs, the media outlet said Friday. The system, called "Watch, Attend and Spell," can correctly lip-read 50 percent of silent speech correctly, while professional lip-readers only got 12 percent right, researchers found. Read: Google AI Firm DeepMind Develops'Streams' App to Help UK Doctors With Patients Some words that rhyme, such as like mat, bat and mat, have similar mouth shapes. However, it's context is what helps lip-reading, Joon Son Chung from the university's Department of Engineering said. The system learns "things that come together, in this case the mouth shapes and the characters and what the likely upcoming characters are," explained Joon.

A deal between Google's artificial intelligence firm DeepMind and the UK's NHS had serious "inadequacies", an academic paper has suggested. More than a million patient records were shared with DeepMind to build an app to alert doctors about patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI). The authors said that it was "inexcusable" patients were not told how their data would be used. Google's DeepMind said that the report contained "major errors". It told the BBC that it was commissioning its own analysis and rebuttal, which the authors said they welcomed. When the deal between London's Royal Free Hospital and DeepMind became public in February 2016, some three months after the data started to be collected, it caused controversy over the amount of patient information being shared and the lack of public consultation.

Robots have learned how to communicate with each other by creating their own language, a new report explains. Experts at artificial intelligence research group OpenAI conducted an experiment that challenged software bots to complete a series of tasks, such as moving to a specific location, in a simple, two-dimensional virtual world. The team used a technique called reinforcement learning, presenting the challenges as cooperative rather than competitive, and rewarding the robots for completing them. "We've just released initial results in which we teach AI agents to create language by dropping them into a set of simple worlds, giving them the ability to communicate, and then giving them goals that can be best achieved by communicating with other agents," wrote the OpenAI team in a blog post. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

On a chilly March afternoon last year in the South Korean capital Seoul, a computer algorithm made history. A program called AlphaGo beat the reigning human world champion at go, an ancient Chinese board game considered to be one of the most complex pastimes man has ever devised. The game has remained an inviolably human pursuit for centuries, and one of the hardest challenges for artificial intelligence (AI) because of the vast number of possible moves -- more than the number of atoms in the universe -- and the need to employ creativity to win. In Seoul's Four Seasons hotel, AlphaGo's victory over five games was ruthless: Lee Sedol, the 33-year-old human go grandmaster, lost 4-1. At a press conference afterwards, he said with a trace of wonder: "Today, I am speechless."

National Grid is to examine how artificial intelligence can be used to make the UK's power distribution infrastructure more efficient. The company admitted over the weekend that it is in talks with Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence unit, which it acquired for $400m in January 2014, as well as a number of other AI specialists. "We are in the very early stages of looking at the potential of working with DeepMind and exploring what opportunities they could offer for us," a spokesperson for National Grid told City AM. "There's huge potential for predictive machine learning technology to help energy systems reduce their environmental impact," they added. The news was broken on Saturday when DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis claimed in an interview with the Financial Times. "We're [in] early stages talking to National Grid and other big providers about how we could look at the sorts of problems they have.

Progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning has been impressive, but there is still much work to be done to advance learning science. While some progress is being made to bring artificial intelligence to the education space as described above, these efforts pale in comparison to advancements in the non-education space. Most of the exciting breakthroughs in 2015 were in fields outside of education. For example, companies such as Amazon and UPS have been piloting the use of drones to deliver packages and other goods to customers. Google recently purchased an AI software company, DeepMind, from a British startup for half a billion dollars.

A data-sharing deal between Google DeepMind and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust was riddled with "inexcusable" mistakes, according to an academic paper published on Thursday. The "Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms" paper -- coauthored by Cambridge University's Julia Powles and The Economist's Hal Hodson -- questions why DeepMind was given permission to process millions of NHS patient records so easily and without patient approval. "There remain many ongoing issues and it was important to document how the deal was set up, how it played out in public, and to try to caution against another deal from happening in this way in the future," Powles told Business Insider in Berlin the day before the paper was published. DeepMind and Royal Free say that the study "completely misrepresents the reality of how the NHS uses technology to process data" and that it contains "significant mistakes." Powles and Hodson said the accusations of misrepresentation and factual inaccuracy were unsubstantiated, and invited the parties to respond on the record in an open forum.