DEEPMIND'S office is tucked away in a nondescript building next to London's Kings Cross train station. From the outside, it doesn't look like something that two of the world's most powerful technology companies, Facebook and Google, would have fought to acquire. Google won, buying DeepMind for £400m ($660m) in January 2014. But why did it want to own a British artificial-intelligence (AI) company in the first place? Google was already on the cutting edge of machine learning and AI, its newly trendy cousin.

AI was a major theme in 2016, with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon all touting their machine-learning chops and virtual-assistant skills. But nothing underscored the coming AI invasion like DeepMind's AlphaGo, which has become so skilled at the strategy board game Go that it trounced world champion Lee Se-dol four games to one. Researchers have long viewed Go--with 361 potential moves on the first turn alone--as the ultimate AI challenge, yet Lee said AlphaGo's decisive victory left him feeling "powerless."

Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.

Alphabet DeepMind, the company's moonshot AI factory, is announcing today (Dec. The software, available on GitHub this week, looks like a cartoonish video game--but it has been carefully built to give AI developers control over how their bots learn. It's not just fun and games--the Lab is a virtual environment that attempts to teach AI strategy, planning, time management, and motor control. Videos released by DeepMind depict a human navigating through the Lab's world as an AI would. "The only known examples of general-purpose intelligence in the natural world arose from a combination of evolution, development, and learning, grounded in physics and the sensory apparatus of animals," DeepMind researchers write in a blog post.

Doctors in London will be getting help from Google-backed AI firm DeepMind, it was announced in a post on Thursday. DeepMind is teaming up with doctors at Imperial College hospitals for a five year partnership. With the Streams app, developed by DeepMind, physicians will be able to monitor the health of patients. The app gathers data about key physiological measures and warns when readings are high or low, according to the BBC. The app came from an agreement with London's Royal Free hospital that gave Google access to 1.6 million patient records.

London artificial intelligence lab DeepMind is setting up a sizeable new team in the US in a bid to increase collaboration with parent company Google. DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014 for £400 million, is planning to hire "a couple of dozen" people at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, according to a DeepMind spokesperson. "We're proud to already have close partnerships with many teams at Google, but we're yet to develop an algorithm that gets rid of time zone differences," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "So we're hiring a small DeepMind Applied team in Mountain View to bridge the gap between Google and our team in London, helping us collaborate even more closely to bring our research breakthroughs to Google users around the world." The expansion represents a significant milestone in DeepMind's journey and comes after Yann LeCun, the head of AI research at Facebook, suggested that DeepMind was too far away from the Google "mothership" to have a significant impact.

The research follows similar work published by a separate group at the University of Oxford earlier this month. Using related techniques, these scientists were able to create a lip-reading program called LipNet that achieved 93.4 percent accuracy in tests, compared to 52.3 percent human accuracy. However, LipNet was only tested on specially-recorded footage that used volunteers speaking formulaic sentences. By comparison, DeepMind's software -- known as "Watch, Listen, Attend, and Spell" -- was tested on far more challenging footage; transcribing natural, unscripted conversations from BBC politics shows.DeepMind's AI program was trained on 5,000 hours of TV More than 5,000 hours of footage from TV shows including Newsnight, Question Time, and the World Today, was used to train DeepMind's "Watch, Listen, Attend, and Spell" program. The videos included 118,000 difference sentences and some 17,500 unique words, compared to LipNet's test database of video of just 51 unique words.

London artificial intelligence lab DeepMind is setting up a sizeable new team in the US in a bid to increase collaboration with parent company Google. DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014 for £400 million, is planning to hire "a couple of dozen" people at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, according to a DeepMind spokesperson. "We're proud to already have close partnerships with many teams at Google, but we're yet to develop an algorithm that gets rid of time zone differences," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "So we're hiring a small DeepMind Applied team in Mountain View to bridge the gap between Google and our team in London, helping us collaborate even more closely to bring our research breakthroughs to Google users around the world." The expansion represents a significant milestone in DeepMind's journey and comes after Yann LeCun, the head of AI research at Facebook, suggested that DeepMind was too far away from the Google "mothership" to have a significant impact.

Alphabet's DeepMind is looking for its first Silicon Valley researcher Alphabet's DeepMind training computers to read lips DeepMind, the artificial intelligence lab that Google Inc. acquired two years ago, may be in the process of more than doubling its workforce roster. It isn't clear when or where London-based DeepMind will begin hiring people, what specific roles it is looking to fill, or if it is in response to doubling down on current projects or preparing for some kind of new task. DeepMind currently employs a team of about 400 computer scientists and neuroscientists, up from around 200 less than a year ago, according to Business Insider. The news of a hiring boost comes just days after it was reported that DeepMind is looking for its first Silicon Valley-based "applied research scientist" position in Mountain View at Google's headquarters where its other AI research division, Google Brain, operates. This would be the company's first researcher hire outside of London.

Microsoft's plan to use machine learning to improve eyecare in India Competition that results in better care for people suffering from visual impairments is the right kind of competition. Following a path similar to that of Google's DeepMind, Microsoft India announced this morning that it's launching a new research group, the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, to bring data-driven eyecare services to India. Whereas DeepMind's swing at ophthalmology targeted the UK, Microsoft's ambitions are a considerably more global. The tech company is working alongside researchers from the United States, Brazil, Australia and, of course, India to train machine learning models that can identify conditions that can lead to blindness. Microsoft's key strategic partnership is with the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country.