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.

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.

Mini World of Bits ("MiniWoB") is a benchmark for reinforcement learning agents who interact with websites. The agents perceive the raw pixels of a small (210x160 pixel) webpage and produce keyboard and mouse actions. The environments are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS and are designed to test the agent's capacity to interact with common web browser elements, such as buttons, text fields, slides, date pickers, etc. The environments of this benchmark are accessible through the OpenAI Universe. Each environment is an HTML page that is 210 pixels high, 160px wide (i.e.

Nick Bostrom, one of the leading voices on artificial intelligence, has singled out London research lab DeepMind as the company closest to developing a system that can mimic human-level artificial intelligence -- a target widely shared by those at the forefront of the AI industry. When asked who was leading the global AI race, Bostrom immediately responded with DeepMind. "Right now, I think here in London we have the DeepMind group who are, I think, the biggest [group] specifically focused on solving general intelligence," Bostrom told Business Insider at a breakfast meeting aboard the Sunbourn Yacht Hotel in East London on Wednesday. DeepMind, which employs approximately 250 people in King's Cross, was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million. The organisation is perhaps best known for developing an AI agent that defeated the world champion of the ancient Chinese board, Go.

Nick Bostrom, one of the leading voices on artificial intelligence, has singled out London research lab DeepMind as the company closest to developing a system that can mimic human-level artificial intelligence -- a target widely shared by those at the forefront of the AI industry. When asked who was leading the global AI race, Bostrom immediately responded with DeepMind. "Right now, I think here in London we have the DeepMind group who are, I think, the biggest [group] specifically focused on solving general intelligence," Bostrom told Business Insider at a breakfast meeting aboard the Sunbourn Yacht Hotel in East London on Wednesday. DeepMind, which employs approximately 250 people in King's Cross, was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million. The organisation is perhaps best known for developing an AI agent that defeated the world champion of the ancient Chinese board, Go.

Ever noticed how DeepMind or Watson challenge and surpass human understanding? Well, these seemingly intelligent engines are not as intelligent as they appear. See, they were developed for specificities and cannot figure out anything outside of what they are programmed for. Yes, these machines are smart, and yet they fail simple tasks that humans excel at on a daily basis. The truth is that these Al technologies are unable to master any of their challenges without human-provided context.

Google's DeepMind is teaming up with the makers of the StarCraft video game to train its artificial intelligence systems. The AI systems "playing" the game will need to learn strategies similar to those that humans need in the real world, DeepMind said. Its ultimate aim is to develop artificial intelligence that could solve any problem. It has previously taught algorithms to play a range of Atari computer games. StarCraft II, made by developer Blizzard, is a real-time strategy game in which players control one of three warring factions - humans, the insect-like Zerg, or aliens known as the Protoss.

DeepMind, a research lab that was acquired by Google for £400 million, has become a well known entity in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for building agents that can learn and master games such as arcade classic "Space Invaders" and the ancient Chinese board game of "Go". Over the last year, the five-year-old company, which employs approximately 250 people in London, has been branching out and applying its self-learning algorithms to fields such as healthcare and energy. On the latter, it's helped Google to slash the electricity bill in its data centres worldwide and it's now exploring how it can help the National Grid to predict demand. But Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, announced on Sunday that the company isn't about to turn its back on the gaming field any time soon. In fact, Hassabis wrote on Twitter that DeepMind has been busy improving the AlphaGo [AG] agent that beat Lee SeDol, the world's best Go player, earlier this year.

Artificial intelligence has a new target in its cross hairs for 2017: StarCraft, a real-time war strategy game series. Like other gamers before them, StarCraft fans may soon be forced to bow down to their machine overlords, as some of the biggest AI research groups set out to beat the best human players. Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google-owned firm DeepMind, and Jeff Dean, who leads the Google Brain project, have both hinted that StarCraft will be their next target, while Facebook researchers have just released an open-source platform designed to help people develop AI to play the game. Succeeding in StarCraft would be a show of strategic strength. AI's gaming prowess reached new heights in March when DeepMind's AlphaGo system defeated one of the world's best Go players, Lee Sedol.