Today we were greeted by the front page of Nature hailing a breakthrough in artificial intelligence: computers are now outperforming even the best humans at the Chinese game of Go, long been seen as the last preserve of human game-playing mastery. The breakthrough, from a team based at Google's DeepMind group in London, has come much earlier than many experts expected. The achievement is also being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding human intelligence, and a large step towards emulating it. However, so was Deep Blue's achievement when it first beat chess world champion, Gary Kasparov, nearly 20 years ago. So where does this latest success really bring us?

In the last few years, the world of artificial intelligence has mainly been dominated by large internet companies with huge computing infrastructures like Google and Facebook, or research universities like MIT or Stanford. The non-profit research firm is backed by heavy hitters like co-chairs Elon Musk (of SpaceX and Tesla fame), Y Combinator's Sam Altman, as well as investor Peter Thiel (who worked with Musk at PayPal). They claim to have garnered a billion dollars in private funding, from people like Thiel and Amazon Web Services. "We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely," OpenAI writes in its first blog post, published just a few moments ago. The goal? Make the scope of A.I less narrow.

High-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has his sights set on building robots that can do housework, have conversations, and play games. In working on these different robotic abilities, Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said he hopes to advance the artificial intelligence algorithms that will be needed to create them. Musk is working on this project alongside Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Sam Altman, as part of OpenAI, an open-source A.I. research company. In a blog post Monday they wrote: "A significant fraction of our research bandwidth is being spent on fundamental research. We'll always be developing and testing new ideas... This is important--our current ideas will not be enough to achieve our long-term goal."

Google has purchased DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company whose goal reportedly is to make computers think like humans. The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant confirmed the deal with technology blog Recode, formerly known as AllThingsD, which first reported on the deal. The British Independent said Google is paying more than $500 million. The Independent also said Google beat out Facebook for the acquisition of the London startup. With the deal, Google appears more interested in talent than anything else.

SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives are pouring $1 billion into a nonprofit aimed at creating artificial intelligence that augments humans' capabilities, rather than making them obsolete. The effort announced Friday, called OpenAI, joins significant investments from companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which have used artificial intelligence to sharpen their businesses with services such as facial recognition or language processing. But the OpenAI founders suggested they have set their sights on bigger problems. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," a blog post on Open-AI's website (bit.ly/1lBMdz9) said.

Google's DeepMind division is using Daily Mail and CNN articles to teach its artificial intelligence programs to read. Using the unique style of articles on the sites - with concise bullet points summarising a story at the top of a page - artificial intelligence was able to learn key facts about articles to answer queries. Ultimately, scientists hope that the study could lead to complex artificial'brains' that can read entire documents and respond to questions put to them by a human. The British-based DeepMind unit analysed almost 400,000 articles from the sites (language process shown). They were used for their unique style of bullets, text and captions. Artificial intelligence was able to learn key facts from the articles.

Earlier this week Google spent £400m buying a UK firm that specialised in artificial intelligence. DeepMind is a privately-held company founded by Demis Hassabis, a 37-year-old neuroscientist and former teenage chess prodigy, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. According to DeepMind's website it builds "powerful general-purpose learning algorithms". But what does Google plan to do with its newly purchased expertise? The company has not issued a detailed statement on the acquisition, but that has not stopped industry observers from trying to work out the motives behind it.

Michael Schmidt is the founder and CTO of Nutonian. Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics in both business and science. Developers and industry analysts are all-in, building castles in the sky with tales of an impending AI "awakening." In preparation for this sea change, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI, a nonprofit with the dual mission of ensuring that AI stays safe and its benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. While it's important to develop AI and harness its powers responsibly, it's incorrect for OpenAI to focus solely on one or two types of AI, like reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is among the least used types of AI, and it offers few immediate safety threats or value to people and businesses.

January 17, 2017 --Eugene "Gene" Cernan, the last human to walk on the moon, passed away Monday at the age of 82. The former astronaut played an important role in America's space program during the height of the Cold War. In addition to being one of only 12 people to have set foot on the moon, he was also only the second American to complete a successful spacewalk during a Gemini mission. On Dec. 11, 1972, Mr. Cernan and fellow astronaut Harrison Schmitt stepped onto the moon for the first time, an experience that he later said in his biography made him no longer belong "solely to the Earth," but "to the universe." But as he touched the moon, his transmission to Houston in the moment was more awestruck: "Oh, my golly. Before becoming an astronaut, Cernan was a pilot with the US Navy. He found himself on the backup crew for Gemini 9, along with Thomas Stafford, until the primary crew was tragically killed in a plane crash before launch. With Gemini 9, Cernan became the third person in the world to complete a successful spacewalk. His 2 hours and 9 minutes spent outside the capsule was a record stretch in 1966. Cernan's first trip to the moon happened in May 1969, during the Apollo 10 mission, though it would be over three years until he actually set foot on the lunar surface. Apollo 10 was a dress rehearsal of sorts, taking measurements from orbit and testing various essential procedures that would be needed for the first actual moon landing with Apollo 11. "I keep telling Neil Armstrong that we painted that white line in the sky all the way to the Moon down to 47,000 feet so he wouldn't get lost, and all he had to do was land," Cernan said in a 2007 interview with NASA. "Made it sort of easy for him." With Apollo 17, Cernan finally got his chance to explore the lunar surface. Over the course of the mission, Cernan and Schmitt travelled 19 miles (30 km) across the lunar surface on a rover, gathering over 220 pounds (100 kg) of moon rocks to bring home for further study. At one point, he traced the letters TDC, the initials of his daughter, on the lunar surface. But when the time came to leave, Cernan, the last man on the moon, was reluctant to leave. "Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make," he said. "I didn't want to go up.

Cernan was born in Chicago in 1935 and graduated from Indiana's Purdue University in 1956. He became a Navy attack pilot before being selected for NASA's astronaut program in 1963. Three years later, he became the second American to walk in space during a Gemini 9 flight ― something he called the "spacewalk from hell" because of several malfunctions in his spacesuit. He logged a total of 566 hours and 15 minutes in space, more than 73 hours of which were on the moon's surface, either in the module or on the ground. Cernan eventually retired from NASA in 1976.