Thanks to advanced new machine learning techniques, artificial intelligences are better at performing human tasks than ever. AIs can tell you what's in your photos, beat you at chess, design typefaces, dream up entirely new cities, and even tweet like Donald Trump--often better than the average person. They can't apply what they've learned from one problem to another--which is why even the best AIs are idiot savants: really smart in one arena, and dumb as sticks in all others. So how can AIs reach this elusive general intelligence? OpenAI--an artificial intelligence research nonprofit backed by Microsoft, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel--thinks it involves AIs playing video games.

I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence. I wanted to work in one of those and be helpful. Because of my background, AI made the most sense. Along with conducting fundamental research, OpenAI can also help increase the level of knowledge that's available on how to use, regulate and evaluate this technology. NIPS is probably the single largest AI conference in the field and it's happening in Barcelona right now. There's a joke among researchers that NIPS is where people get together to discuss papers that came out four months ago. That's because the paper deadline was then, and the pace of modern AI research is so fast that much of the industry has subsequently moved onto new techniques and new papers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers around the world will soon be able to use DeepMind's "flagship" platform to develop innovative computer systems that can learn and think for themselves. DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, announced on Monday that it is open-sourcing its "Lab" from this week onwards so that others can try and make advances in the notoriously complex field of AI. The company says that the DeepMind Lab, which it has been using internally for some time, is a 3D game-like platform tailored for agent-based AI research. Founded in 2010, DeepMind has been developing AI agents that can master arcade games like "Space Invaders," "Pac-Man," and more recently the incredibly complex Chinese board game of Go. Describing the Lab platform in a blog post, DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg and DeepMind employees Charles Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen, wrote: "It is observed from a first-person viewpoint, through the eyes of the simulated agent. Scenes are rendered with rich science fiction-style visuals. The available actions allow agents to look around and move in 3D. The agent's'body' is a floating orb. It levitates and moves by activating thrusters opposite its desired direction of movement, and it has a camera that moves around the main sphere as a ball-in-socket joint tracking the rotational look actions. "Example tasks include collecting fruit, navigating in mazes, traversing dangerous passages while avoiding falling off cliffs, bouncing through space using launch pads to move between platforms, playing laser tag, and quickly learning and remembering random procedurally generated environments." The DeepMind Lab aims to combine several different AI research areas into one environment. Researchers will be able to test their AI agent's abilities on navigation, memory, and 3D vision, while determining how good they are at planning and strategy. "Each are considered frontier research questions in their own right," DeepMind wrote in the blog post. "Putting them all together in one platform, as we have, represents a significant new challenge for the field." The Lab can be adapted and extended, with the possibility to create new "levels" that can be "customised with gameplay logic, item pickups, custom observations, level restarts, reward schemes, in-game messages and more." "We believe it has already had a significant impact on our thinking concerning numerous aspects of intelligence, both natural and artificial," wrote the blog posts' authors. "However, our efforts so far have only barely scratched the surface of what is possible in DeepMind Lab.

Unfortunately, the new training platform created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, is only available to AI -- so if you're human, you're out of luck. The new'college' is, in actuality, a training platform called Universe, whereby AI can interact with games, web browsers, protein folding software, and "transfer learning," which allows them to take what they've learned in one application and apply it to another. The AI engages via Virtual Network Computing, or VNC, which involves them sending simulated mouse and keyboard strokes. The Universe digital suite's home is in the OpenAI artificial intelligence learning center in San Francisco, where developers will begin "measuring and training AI agents." OpenAI is the non-profit brainchild of entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have made no secret of their ambitions to greatly accelerate the research and development of transhumanist technologies.

Microsoft's continued investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology is paying dividends. The company has partnered with OpenAI, a non-profit company founded earlier this year to advance the field of machine intelligence for the benefit of humanity. As part of the deal, announced Tuesday, OpenAI will use Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud provider, an important win for Microsoft as it competes with the likes of Amazon, Google, and IBM to power the next generation of intelligent applications. OpenAI is backed by the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, controversial investor Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. On top of that, Microsoft also launched a set of cloud services all aimed at furthering intelligent applications.

Google DeepMind is launching a project to reduce the time it takes doctors to prepare treatment for head and neck cancers. Alphabet's London-based artificial intelligence division has partnered with the UK's National Health Service and will be conducting the research in coordination with the University College London Hospital. Head and neck cancers are hard to plan treatment for because of their close proximity to important parts of the body. Before any kind of radiation treatment, clinicians will prepare a detailed map of where radiation will be administered on a patient in order to avoid damaging surrounding tissue. DeepMind says planning can take doctors up to four hours for head and neck cancers, and it hopes that by applying machine learning it will be able to automate parts of the process and reduce that planning time down to an hour.

DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence outfit, wants to streamline health care by using machine learning to provide medics with intelligent notifications. But not everyone is happy with the piles of data being shared with the company. The project will provide medics across a number of London hospitals with alerts about patients via an app called Streams. The app is meant to provide easy access to patient histories and test results for nurses and doctors. But its system will also learn to track patterns in patients' blood test data and flag cases that show early signs of kidney injury to the appropriate doctors.

The training and evaluation scripts support the following problems (see util.py for more details): New problems can be implemented very easily. You can see in train.py Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist from Florida thats been entrenched in the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written hundreds of articles about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

OpenAI, the nonprofit backed by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to promote artificial intelligence that helps rather than harms humanity, opened a new virtual training center on Monday. It's called Universe, and anyone building artificial intelligence programs can use it. With Universe, developers can train artificial intelligence applications with games, websites, web browsers and other apps. The idea here is that the more an AI system practices using interfaces designed for human users, the more human-like AI can become. But since Universe is open for anyone to use, that leaves the door open to developers who may utilize Universe to train AI in a way that would beget harm -- precisely what Musk's nonprofit aims to prevent.