Google's DeepMind has announced a five-year agreement with a UK National Health Service (NHS) trust that will give it access to patient data to develop and deploy its healthcare app, Streams. The new partnership follows an earlier agreement, the details of which New Scientist first revealed in April, which generated concerns over the amount and nature of data made available to DeepMind. The Streams app is designed to deliver an alert about a patient's condition to a doctor's or nurse's cellphone in a similar way to getting a news notification. It will initially be used from 2017 to spot people at risk of kidney problems, but is due to be expanded over the five years to include other functions such as detecting blood poisoning and coordinating patient treatment. DeepMind is working on the project with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals.

Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust have announced a fresh five-year collaboration today, which will see the former's DeepMind AI used to improve patient care across the trust's various hospital sites. The partnership will focus on Streams, a mobile app the pair have been working on since late last year that's been approved as a medical device by the UK's health regulator. DeepMind will analyse blood test results as they come in and flag when patients might be at risk of acute kidney injury, proactively alerting carers through the Streams app. It'll go live across the trust in early 2017, and there are plans to expand the blood analysis to look for signs of sepsis and other causes of organ failure. The pair hope to add messaging and task management features over the course of the collaboration too, and Streams is said to be built on open standards that will allow other developers to easily add new services.

DeepMind Health, the division of the Google-owned AI company that's focused on building links to healthcare providers to drive the application of machine learning algorithms for preventative medicine, has inked a fresh data-sharing agreement with the NHS Royal Free Hospital Trust in London. It's the second agreement signed between the pair -- and it supersedes their original agreement inked last year, which ran into controversy after a freedom of information request by New Scientist revealed the volume of patient identifiable medical data (PID) flowing from the Royal Free to DeepMind, and raised questions about whether NHS information governance principles were being correctly followed. The data in question was being used to power an app called Streams, built by DeepMind but using an NHS algorithm to generate alerts on patients at risk of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). At the time the collaboration was made public, last February, no details were provided about how much PID was being shared between DeepMind and the NHS -- leading to huge consternation when the scope of the arrangement emerged. The U.K.'s data watchdog, the ICO, began investigating complaints about the data-sharing agreement. The Streams app also ran into trouble when it was revealed DeepMind and the Royal Free had not registered it as a medical device with the oversight body, the MHRA, despite piloting the app in the Royal Free's hospitals.

Musk has been vocal in his warnings about the potential downside of the rise of the robots. He has invested millions in OpenAI, a project to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits mankind, rather than destroys it, and last week he said that it was only a matter of time before AI was used to take down the internet. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," Musk told CNBC. "I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen."

On the very eve itself of Microsoft's third major developer event this year -- Connect() 2016 in New York -- the firm has taken another directly open stride in its Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts. Microsoft has announced a new partnership with OpenAI, the nonprofit research organisation co-founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. In line with this news, Microsoft also introduced a selection of Azure cloud releases designed to drive what it hopes will be advances in AI. But why did the firm do any of this? "We want to democratize AI," asserts the usually fairly gutsy non-marketing official Microsoft blog channel. Microsoft's says its partnership with OpenAI will be focused on making'significant contributions' to advancing the field of AI.

Google's AI achieved record scores playing Atari and beat a human during a game of Go – but to do so, the system needed constant training over a long period of time. In order to speed up and simplify the learning process, the team at DeepMind has now taught its AI to dream in a way that is similar to animals. After replaying sequences of a game containing rewarding events, the system proved to learn the stages 10 times faster than previous algorithms. To speed up the learning process, the team at DeepMind has now taught its AI to dream in a way that is similar to animals. After the system began'dreaming' about a game called Labyrinth (pictured), it proved to learn the stages 10x faster than the previous algorithms DeepMind's system Unreal was augmented with two additional tasks.

DeepMind is a'vacuum for very, very clever people', says Ocado Technology's head of data

Google will buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind. The Information reports that the acquisition price was more than $500 million, and that Facebook was also in talks to buy the startup late last year. DeepMind confirmed the acquisition to us, but couldn't disclose deal terms. The acquisition was originally confirmed by Google to Re/code. Google's hiring of DeepMind will help it compete against other major tech companies as they all try to gain business advantages by focusing on deep learning.

Microsoft has announced a new partnership with OpenAI, the $1 billion artificial intelligence research nonprofit cofounded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman. Under the terms of the partnership, OpenAI will use the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service as the "preferred" place to do its AI experiments. In return, Microsoft gets increased access to OpenAI's deep bench of robotics and experts, making Azure a better place for building AI-powered software. "You want to get a good feedback loop going," says Microsoft Executive VP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie. "That helps you ultimately build a better platform."

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet--dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like--in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these artificial intelligences (AIs) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.